Forgotten Field of Forever

Forgotten field of forever I knew you once . . . in daffodil days when I wandered in wisteria ways. Sprightly I skipped and rarely tripped. Hope really did spring eternal then in the spring of my strawberry youth. Dahlia daydreams drifted often like dandelion fluff through the corridors of my mind - a mind not yet tainted by taxing times inevitably to come as faster and faster I would speed along my path of life. Like a gamboling lamb, fresh, frisky and free-spirited, I faced my own little fun and frivolous world. Hardly was I heedful of the woes of those forced to fight in foreign fields across the ocean, in a nation where peace was hardly known. In killing fields were the most innocent of citizens pawns of a futile war. Such things did not enter my pre-teen mind. I was but a child. Sachet sweet were my springs and sassy sassafras my summers. In back-to-school autumnal afternoons I fled home to fields of happy play, never with a thought given to the heartache of mothers whose soldier sons were lost to bullets or bombs. I sleepwalked cluelessly through a decade of war far removed from me as I played games of pretend with equally clueless friends Blissfully we skipped our ropes and chattered merrily like monkeys in the school yard. So innocent was I then that barely can I bring back those sun-filled daffodil days to my recollection. In too short time, my grand little dreams of long ago wafted upward to a cumulus of forgetfulness. No more do I lay myself down in grass to look up at diamond-studded skies or drift into slumber with visions of the visages of my juvenile crushes while cheesy 60’s love songs linger softly on my radio. Those faraway times are as forgotten as the lives that vanished in Nam. They can only belong to the forgotten field of forever.