Donald

You stank, and poo was once revealed when pants were pulled in playing field. Hard round briquettes, quite dry, like dung with straw sun-hard and undigested. All kinds of unkind taunts and silly songs were sung and rumour did the rounds of Traveller’s goings on in dog-bark fenced compound. Nothing known, but always just suggested. What were your meals in trailer park, beside the fields, beside the rec, beside the school where boys all played you for the fool, and girls sang ‘stinky bum’, and parent’s day didn’t see your dad, and did you even have a mum? You struck a chin full fist when foot deployed to halt your playground dinky toy. Your anger clearly boiled beneath. Did you every day recoil from father’s buckled belt, or older brother’s fist, or even mother’s wounding cuffs confined to caravan on drizzle chilly days as autumn shed cold leaf? You walked with ricket bandied legs, a waddled painful labour. I too was your tormentor, on endless friendless days and lonely playground corners, and classes where the empty desk was always nearest neighbour. Your white and skinny scabied form found true excuse from sports. No one saw 'there', beneath your shabby shorts, except the school and nit nurse. We always thought your underpants were wet, or stained, or worse, and most days did you even wear your soiled and threadbare underwear? Would these older opened eyes now see you as a son? Would softened heart now empathise with how you had begun your life and realise the pain and strife that laid your path, where mine was carefree fun? These older eyes are sorry now, with memory’s regret. But yet that child knew not the pain that surely comes to all, and tempered hearts cannot relive the spring before the fall.