HEADING HOME

For over a year I've been posting a poem each day on my Facebook page and rarely do I share any of them on Bard at Bay because the Facebook posts tend to be absurdist verse, quickly read and easily disposed of. Now and again, however, one of those daily rhymes finds its way here and this one's an example of what you can find if you visit my public Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/

LAND OF YOUTH

Rex was a jaded retiree

whose joie de vivre was history.

A faded fellow, seen by some

as dull and permanently glum.

He saw a ladder on a wall

that wasn’t really there at all.

The wall itself was real enough,

full twelve feet tall, its finish rough;

the ladder, Rex could clearly see,

was unreal, purely fantasy,

and yet he scaled it, rung by rung,

with zest he had not felt since young.

Up, up he climbed, small, bony-kneed,

and felt his adulthood recede

with every step. A child again,

he climbed out of the world of men

into a realm where pains and aches

gave way to comic-books and cakes,

to conkers, roller-skates, balloons,

his old banjo, its tuneless tunes.

Rex, to his joy, saw Spike, his cat,

dead fifty years, grown sleek and fat,

and Jack, his terrier, alive,

who had been dead for fifty-five.

Around him, like chess-pieces, ranged

his childhood friends, each hardly changed,

his mother, young and free from care,

his father with a head of hair,

a cricket bat, a brand new ball,

those battered stumps, Rex could recall

from countless summers long ago

with Father shouting, bowl don’t throw.

Rex slowly realised the truth:

this was, of course, the Land of Youth,

the Tír na hÓige , he’d learned about.

Again, he heard his father shout,

who wants to climb this apple tree?

Rejuvenated, Rex cried, me!