Paul Willis

Children Reading Books, ca. 1930

Three girls, actually, bunched on the broad, shallow steps
of what must be the library, sitting so close
that they are touching, though they are unconscious of that,
each one only aware of the story unfolding in her hands.

The girl closest to the camera hunches in high-waisted pants
held up by white suspenders that cross in the back
beneath the pale nape of her neck, her dark hair matching 
the shade of the scuffed boot braced to one side.

The girl in the middle wears overalls and pigtails,
her hair some lighter color in the black-and-white photograph.
Her knees bend like a grasshopper’s as she leans
into the book in her lap.  She seems the sort of girl,

if you called her name and she looked up,
who would have freckles spreading across her narrow face.
The farthest girl, with her back against the wall by the entrance,
is the only one we see head on.  In a checked dress and dark sweater,

she sits with her knees tucked neatly and demurely beneath her.
Her hair is black and full around her downturned eyes
in a way that graces everyone, and her left hand
curls around the spine of the book protectively

while her right hand readies to turn the page.
These three girls, they must be friends—they have to be—
so very together, so very apart, for this one moment 
reading their way out of the picture, into their past.

After the Edson Smith Photo Collection Children Reading Books.

Paul Willis has published six collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Little Rhymes for Lowly Plants (White Violet Press). His latest book is a YA Elizabethan time-travel novel, All in a Garden Green (Slant). He is a professor of English at Westmont College and a former poet laureate of Santa Barbara. Also by this poet “Arroyo Burro Beach, ca. 1900