Tread Softly, Here Lies Our Dream
(A Mother's Words)

He was just a lad. He touched spider webs after rain
and cried when his puppy died. I remember this scene,
as I part my curtains and watch, reluctant to gaze
upon revelry. They're all feeling gay today,
those people in the streets. Of course,
they didn't know him. To them, he was simply another child.
Unshared responsibility. Someone else's dream.
He played games, up and down and inside-out
and he learned to go away and never pouted. Brave boy,
stout, marching in another's shadow. Stretching his full height
to fill the void, pushing pride to it's limits.
I wonder if someone might have said, "Lad, you're a man now."
and rattled off a list of tattered cliches.
I wonder if someone might have said, "This is how it's done.",
then showed him the way and issued his gun.
I wonder if that someone has a son.
Surely someone must have known, as I do now,
as certainly as I still feel the pain of labour,
that he was faceless in the crowds;
slipping through rows of booted babies.
All blood being red, after all, who would recall?
No smiling moon, sifting dreamdust
on sleeping cherub cheeks,
only another martyr for the children's crusade.
Like home, when the lights went out
in a storm, he died in the dark.

I hear beyond the curtain, voices like a stream,
the women on our street saying, "He was such a lad!
Talking of pranks and silly annoyances,
hadn't they already decided he'd never amount to much anyway?
Someone else's problem. Someone else's dream.
They've packed him away with their linen and doilies,
swallowed him in mincing bites along with their social teas
and apricot brandy, buried him in their rubbish bins
with yesterdays newspapers and hung flags in their windows,
only God knows why,
and I watch him evaporate like steam on a window glass,
while all his little dolls weep for my lost dream.

by Adele C. Geraghty
Greyhound From Portland

Night retreats, in the pursuit of happiness.
Two am and three hours til departure.
Leaving Longfellow Square, a half day behind,
in taxi clarity of blue-gray stone
and trashy autumn's tawdry orange.

Outside the terminal,
fallen road angels cluster for a smoke;
bards of the highway,
telling tales of who 'did 'em wrong'.
Listing boats without anchor,
foraging friendliness
in the absolution of strangers.

Hungry eyes snare the small child,
as she skips the dirty tiles of the station,
waiting for her folded dollar treasure
to slip through her fingers,
plunging chum to the waiting shark.

'Have ya got some change, Mizzes?'
'Do ya got a smoke?'

Too old to turn away without feeling,
too same to share what I need,
I take my coffee as inhalation
from the coach driver's cup
and smoke my last cigarette.


by Adele C. Geraghty
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