When I Was a Boy
Boyhood was a one-night stand,
So brief and unforgettable,
Full of dreams,
Sweet —like a rooftop party,
Wild and loud,
When the world several feet below,
Full of envy, shouted at us,
“Come down quickly!
Quick!”
Boyhood charmed me and
Did not harm me
It was a different time,
A different boy-game
All was different
Including the falsehood of the time
Fibs were crammed with the essence of joy.
Mawkish, they strengthened the walls of
Defence, by pulse or by slush —
One gave way for the other to flourish.
And I saw things the way they truly were,
Either red or white;
Nothing like reddish-white
Or whitish-red.
Just red or white.
Plain.
Pure and simple.
I didn’t mix colours except when I was painting
With brush and colours on drawing paper
White with the innocence of dawn
Watercolour streamed with tears
Genuinely shed with common bliss.
Our loudest poem was Twinkle,
Twinkle, Little Star
I’ve never ceased to wonder how they twinkled
In the dull eyes of dinosaurs!
And there was Humpty Dumpty,
Our dear friend.
Santa or Father Christmas,
Called and addressed according to your own side of
The pond, possessed the redness that charmed us
And the whiteness that froze us with ecstasy
And with the dynamism of Sunday school songs
Oh, his beard! Mammatus clouds so full and rolling!
The outlines of trees back then resembled the clusters of
Overgrown clouds laughing their senses off
Above us foolish little masquerades
A scene of a flowering act.
With our eyes we saw it all
Just like the serial films we saw —
They all made sense —from Gunsmoke to
Bonanza and Hawaii-50
We saw all with grey, tiny eyes on grainy television
Screens, elevated boxes of palatial balls
Those days smelled differently —
With the fragrance of natural love
And the beats of honourable music
And we scribbled figures of maths on
Each other’s back, symbols of agricultural tools.
Oh, the arrangements of the planets,
Beginning with Earth,
Our darling Earth,
Since charity must commence at home.
Politics was far from us
So was double entendre . . .
A one-off incident,
Boyhood is a museum —
You take nothing with you while
Exiting it.
I drive back to it only on the reference gear.
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