A poem on the impressions of childhood

Childhood

Childhood,

Like a question unasked,

Hovers

In the silence between the pauses.

Childhood,

With its dog barking,

Chained and unfed in the back yard,

Is still straining against its leash.

Childhood,

With its stunted branches and fallen leaves,

Its fruit unpicked, or rotting on the ground,

Stands too close to the house and blocks the light.

Childhood,

With its cracked façade and leaking roof,

With its windows starred from stone throwing,

Has condemned its inhabitants.

Childhood,

With its locked doors and unswept floors,

Has thickened its cholesterol dust on the shelves

Of unread books.

Childhood,

With its plagiarised photographs

Passing themselves off as memory,

Has slipped in its frame.

Childhood,

With its fat piggy bank of unspent pennies,

In an unopened drawer,

Is bankrupt.

Childhood,

With its dreams locked behind panes of glass,

Buzzing at the trapped sky,

Has shed its fragile husk.

Childhood,

With its candle left burning

To play hide and seek amongst the shadows,

Gutters in the darkness.

Childhood,

Like a question unanswered,

Hovers

Between the silences and the pauses.

       

"Oh, piteous satire upon mankind; that providence should have endowed almost every child so richly because it knew in advance what was to befall it: to be brought up by 'parents', i.e. to be be made a mess of in every possible way."

Kierkegaard, The Journals