It's Poetry Friday time and since this is my first Friday since school ended, I thought I might celebrate the start of my ntwith sharing a poem here.
I wrote this poem 32 years ago when I was in my late 20's. I came across it today when going through boxes stored in our Garage Attic or the Grattic as we like to call it.
I recited this poem publicly some 30 years ago. It went over like a lead balloon like all the poems I recited that night. I tool one of them out of mothballs and posted it here on Poetry Friday 3 years back. It was well received so I thought I'd share this one as well.
Life In A Hall of Mirrors
Distant music of the Ice Cream Truck
Wafts sweetly through the streets
Children Stop Their Playing
Pavlovian dogs pull allowance out of pockets
Catching A glimpse of the truck
They pursue their pied piper
The Truck stops; The smiling driver is cheered by the crows
The children happily exchange their money
For sticks wrapped in paper
An old man watches them pretend to eat ice cream
And tells of the old days
When The Ice Cream Man sold Ice Cream
(And it cost less too!)
The children say they like pretending better
The Ice Cream Man drives off
Wondering what to leave off next
The stick or the wrapper
Karen Edmisten is hosting Poetry Friday this week. Click here to get there.
4 comments:
Grattic! : )
There is an eerie air to Life in a Hall of Mirrors! Crows and deception seem to accompany this Ice Cream fellow. I want to know more!
You can throw anything you want at children and people in desperate situations (I'm thinking of asylum seekers I met living in containers in a refugee camp), and they will always find a way to cope, to imagine, to dream. Love it!
Cheered by the crows is eerie! Very EAP (Edgar Allen Poe). It’s supposed to be crowd. Curse you spell check! Now I’m afraid to change it.
Ha, a happy accident in that spellcheck moment, Dave! I liked "crows" too because it added an interesting/weird undertone that is open to interpretation, like e.e. cummings' goat-footed balloon man. Maybe you're back at the beginning with this piece?
As Wendell Berry said in the poem I shared this week, "we are
either beginning or we are dead." Always something new to explore!
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