The river that ran through my boyhood

still runs.  On a hot summer night I, no longer

a child, walked the old path savouring river

muck smells and bat flight.  No longer a child,

the darkened tree depths contained no

opponents ready for battle.  Try as I might

I could conjure not one nazi waiting to be

dispatched with a quick blast from my mouth

sound machine gun.  Now the boys in battle

carry stick lazer-guns and the sound they

make is zip.  Try as I might I can't see how zip

could kill a fly.  But then, I am no longer

a child.  Older now than even a child's

imagining I walked along the path beside

my boyhood river and came around the bend

to where the tree still stands taller than the

rest and the rope is still hanging.  There in the

moonlight was a boy alone.  It might have been

streetlight, the city has changed but not boys or the river.  He held the rope like a champion

and ran up in the air out over the river and

back to the bank in an arc of triumph so complete he didn't need to look around to see

who watched.  When I stepped from the

shadow he looked me full in the face and said,

want to try it.  Of course all of us, no longer

children, know what happened.  It was the

child in me the boy saw, even more clearly 

than I can remember who reached up and

grabbed the rope with expert childhood

hands and fumbling adult fingers.  It was the child in me who swung like a hero out across

the boyhood river and back to the bank like

I had done it all my life.  It was I, no longer

a child, who ran the wrong way and swung

like gravity to the tree.

 

 

On me there are scars now, boyhood trips and fights and those other scars we get later. 

There among them all are the scars from that

hot summer night when I made incongruous

contact with the tree still standing taller than

the rest . . .  and the child I am no longer.