Childhood Poem by Ashley Akari

These phantoms crowd about
My lonely heart:
Their eyes are cold
But their embrace is warm –
Dread yet familiar ghosts.

Childhood.

Old men use such memories
To feed their fading fires—
But they are bitter to me.

The shadow of the slums
Is hardly shattered by
The mellow glow of Californian suns,
And the birdsongs
Are quite drowned by the
Distant rumbles of empty stomachs.

Mornings, then,
Were not the joyful sunbursts
Of pampered minds.

No.

There was no world outside
The grey, stained walls.
Our fathers saw their life,
Distorted,
Through the beer glass,
And we hunted for a rainbow
In the looming concrete slabs.

This bleak World was our prison,
But we hardly knew we were prisoners:
For there were no visions
In that sullen colony,
No Promised Land.

We accepted the shackles
Of our fathers’ disease:
How could we fight for
What we never saw?

But we longed for beauty
With strange thirst:
Our eyes devoured
The rare green blade pushing
Through the black mud
Or the snatch of blue sky
Glimpsed through the
Scowling towers.
Of our Pauper’s’ Kingdom.

Love, too,
We longed for—
Not the shallow love of secure hearts,
But the steadfast, solid love
Of the loveless.

Other children play “mother and father”—
I was both to ragged brothers:
With hungry eyes,
We watched the sleek passers-by,
The lucky ones:

People who still believe
The World is a bright place:

For them, their happy childhood
Is the blanket to warm them on the stormy nights….

I never had one.