Childhood's End Poem by James Logan

For Hardt
Before I knew the meaning of the word
I loved the crocus nonetheless,
and the azalea too,
as well as the tall, sticky pines
and a thousand other marvels of nature.
While I yet could distinguish between the soft round of the 'S'
and the hard angularity of the 'Z'
Even before I learned that one and one and one make three,
And even before I began to fathom that the words themselves
were merely signposts,
I had already learned to understand the thing-in-itself, the destination of the words
Things both seen and unseen:
the invisible things: things like the happiness of reaching first base safely,
the thrill of the high dive, the comfort that came with my Mother's attention when I was sick,
the security of my Father's presence,
but the evil things too: the gnawing envy when a neighbor's child got a new baseball glove,
the fear that the plane my parents were on might crash and burn, - - the petty, petulant ways
of selfishness
But, too, those solid things, things you could stub your toe on or bang your knees on;
and the most wondrous things of all - -those creatures which seemed to operate independently.
Butterflies whose beauty lie not only in their colors and patterns, but also in the amazing strength
contained within their fragility,
Butterflies with their crazy, erratic dances in the air that came to settle weightlessly on our arms- -
little arms, burnished with the summer sun
in the days when we lived without shoes or shirts.
Just shorts and thin patches of dirt randomly splotched upon our tiny, tanned bodies.
Days were longer then. And I have forgotten so many important things since then.
We could beat out the measure of time like a metronome set to our own rhythms.
Stretching out the minutes between the first call to dinner until the time we actually came in,
Squeezing out so very much life between the gloaming and the settling of evening- -
from the time when the skies were all chimney red, plum, lavender and peach
smeared like a Monet styled watercolor across the sky,
the edges of the clouds etched in gold,
to the fading away into the mystical, magical flickering of the fireflies with their phosphorescent blinking Morse code and
the perfume of the day's freshly mowed lawn mixing with the ripe summer peaches- -
peaches with heads so full of ripeness now, bent over in benediction on the branches;
heads bowed before their willing sacrifice to become our cobblers
or settle into wooden ice cream buckets.
But the peach trees have been hewed- - - vanished to make room for rows of new homes;
The ice cream bucket long since given over to new purposes; for a while, used to gather odds and ends,
And then given its last rites as it was finally laid to rest in some mammoth garbage truck.
We have moved on - - all of us - - through all the spinning and revolving, we have all moved on
to a new neighborhood of the universe
moved so very far through time and space and further still from Alpha Centauri and the numberless
other stars which guided all our explorers…..
yet still so far to go,
Still, in my own race, I can no longer see the starting place but only the spot on the horizon beyond
which I know the finish line awaits.
I realize now that dying is not the tragedy; it is that we should know we shall die
wherein the tragedy lies.
The years compacted, the days and nights no longer elastic. I am now a boy of 62.
So little time, and yet so much to unlearn.
But still, I smile when I am at the edge of the high dive, see a firefly, or remember the creamy taste
of hand cranked peach ice cream. Only now, when my neighbor's son gets a new baseball glove,
I simply smile and secretly rejoice with him.