Boy In a Crumbling Landscape
I was born to a city. Once was that city,
grout and soot were my bloodline
I was in it that city, and it was in me,
my eyes were hundreds of windows,
thousands of street lamps.
I was hoodwinked and bounded
by the hoops of an encircling blight.
My child-body an extension of docks,
cranes and wharfs,
of grey schools on the drizzling corners
of grayer days, small narrow shops
on dreary cramped streets, roads strewn
with the detritus of poverty, all an adjunct
of my urban milieu.
I never imagined that another city existed,
one unknown to the drab and mean byways.
I felt I was the scaffolding of that place
and that which I did not belong to
was beyond my view.
I was the glue of my own stark world.
It was then a shock
when they said I was to be moved
to the country.
I wanted to ask - What country,
what manner of place
could my cityscape fit into?
Little by little, brick by brick
I shed the cement filled hollows
while a newer me
shorn of the pasts teaming crush
sought higher acres.
Green pastures taught me to fly
far from of that self
I was leaving behind.
Copyright © Eric Ashford | Year Posted 2021
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