My Old Playground Poem by Kevin Patrick

When I was a boy
Playgrounds had grit

They were assembled for kids
Born with rough and tumble limbs;
Blue-collar builds,
and hurdy endurance;
enough to sterilize gorillas
to our mean street steel jungles

We had sleet gripped monkey bars
Which we flung from, like parachutist
Sometimes falling down before
We made it to the finish

The decks were plied with wood
Aged planks, with ripened lacquer
That bore little tiny splinters
And broken shafts of timber
But we earned our cuts and bruises
These were our makeshift kingdoms
And Band Aids were the price
To keep our Pirates Citadels

The slides were made of stainless steal
And when the summer sun seared
It would scorch us
Through our shorts
With a rosy shade of brown
But it didn’t stop us
For going out for seconds

We even played with speed on merry go rounds
Spinning so fast that our eyes went
Dizzy, with the terminal rush
Of an astronaut,
we felt the Centrifugal forces
build our Iron Constitution.
And when we got sick,
It was all worth it
Because we had earned
our lions mettle

There were rusted rocket bones
That we climbed in and drove
But if you were too fat
You’d get stuck in the aft
And had to be pushed
With butter or lard
We had gigantic teeter totters
That lifted eight feet
And if your partner jumped
You’d have a bump
Of a wounded pride
And a score to set with friends


We got hurt, we got burned
We got Scrapes and scabs
We went home with bruises
And sometimes knees thrashed
There were splinters and slivers
And shakable girders
Buildings too tall
There now beyond safety limits
But for all of these dangers
And physical glitches


We had fun