The little ball (A tiny tale about experience, belief, and wisdom)...

The little ball was filled with air.

When the field asked, “What's in you?"

The ball said, “I've never been in there,

But still my days continue.”

A foot came down, moved by a leg,

To kick that ball: a sound

Rang back and forth, like through a hall:

across and back, around.

So, whistle-cutting through the sky,

The ball made this connection:

“If halls ring, full of wind, so I

Must hold air, too, I reckon.”

Another leg came, and stopped the ball;

Another foot then drove it.

Each time, that ringing sound out-called;

“This is my name—I know it!”

The field asked, “Your name is what?”

But now sitting still, while the legs convened,

The little ball's defining 'duuunt'

Could not be heard, nor its flying seen.

“I promise you, I have a name.

I've sung it across your dust-white lines!

I leap across them, game by game.

I even wear their chalk, sometimes!”

“Ha ha, the stories that you tell,”

The blind field cooed with adoration.

“So many balls dream just like you,

In their young imaginations.”

The ball felt soft, being disbelieved,

and having in itself no way to show

what its airy core had (somehow?) received

and, flight by flight, it'd come to know.

But then, a toe caught in the grass, and

Brought a man's face howling down to the field:

In anger and pain, he uplifted the ball...

“Listen now! I will sing my name. It's real!”

*

This long world creates, and then out-survives us.

We crash against each other, here on it, and see

That our insides develop when others propel us:

                 whether kindly or cruelly,

                                       Wisely or foolly,

They show us what we're filled with—and what we're going to be.