recite

The kids prance around the yard quoting “Macbeth” a decade before he’ll stage it and Mescal gets to recite a “Hamlet” soliloquy as a little treat.

“Believe it or not, I was incredibly shy,” he said, recounting his fear at having to recite poetry in school.

“Write the vision and make it plain,” she recited.

It means sweating in a suit, watching Ma cry up close, and reciting that dumb grief script to everyone who asks, under threat of Ma’s heat vision.

She could multiply fractions, turn a cartwheel, and recite entire stanzas of “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” a marvelous poem about a shipwreck by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.