When I was a Child.

When I was a Child, childhood was forever,
there was no end in sight, no conclusion,
no distant station at the end of the line:
but a darkness lingered on the edge of my world,
like a cold chill beneath the door,
tainting the beautiful vision
with cracks and fissures of obscurity.
But I endured, and strangely,
those potent days in the summer-drenched fields
keep close reality, and the grass
still feels silky to the touch
and the sky today is blue with dreaming
and the insects drone a song
of infinite understanding and timelessness.

When I was a child, I chased shadows
through streets of borrowed dream;
I walked the hills and woods
to escape the darkness:
I touched trees to life and loved sunlight
through veins of pulsing leaves,
and ladybirds like red dots on the sun.
I roamed valleys that hummed with past voices,
where streams whispered poetry
as the evening cast its cloak.

When I was a child, the sun shone brightest
on those gleaming meadow days
when secret kisses tangled with buttercups,
and girls were scented with enchantment,
rolling in the soft satin grass of the meadow.
Mystery stalked the musky air
and days were golden with promise,
a treasure-trove of innocence,
of apples unbitten and fruitful expectation.

When I was a child, the clouds were huge and billowing,
the sky curved into infinity
and the earth filled our universe
with no room at the edges.
The days crept by like a lazy stream
and we tumbled through life
like Fidler’s Lum,
the secret waterfall beneath the willows,
only to emerge from the tumult
strangely changed, burdened with the weight
of adulthood and the seriousness
of gazing unblinkingly into the future.