Take Me Back Poem by Seamus O' Brian

take me home.

take me back to that burnt-grass studded, sand pitted patch we called a yard that was 9 parts weed and 1 part florida sand and only felt cool because it was 2 degrees cooler than the gutter-lined tar melting streets that burnt the cataracts into my eyes on those july afternoons when the nimbus clouds climbed the shoulders of the world trying to get out Florida like everybody else with a car and a tank of gas.



take me back to the flash-bang lightning grenades and bumble bee stinging thunderstorm raindrops that welted barefoot boys racing home on steaming streets; cut off jean shorts that would only dry after 2 glasses of grape Kool-aid had purple mustached us all and hotels had gone up on Boardwalk and Park Place.



take me back to Gilligans Island and when I believed in trees with brown fuzzy coconuts and that if you were honest and true everything would work out just fine before the last commercial break, and nobody snickered if you climbed a pile of dirt, stuck out your chest and proclaimed 'Truth, Justice and the American Way! '

take me back to that school I pretended to hate, to lines of children wandering from fractions to lunch and segregated for cootie hygiene, where the only medicine for ADD was hanging in the principal's office and we didn't sharpen pencils for sharper pencils but to look out the window and plot our recess.

To pledging allegiance and wondering if the Emergency Broadcast System would ever broadcast an emergency, to head-down desktop naps and secretly praying that God would give me a girlfriend before He unleashed Armageddon.

I pledged my allegiance and I sang through the rockets' red glare and I believed in those fuzzy brown coconuts. I believed in Truth and Justice and the American Way. I believed that if I was Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent that everything would always work out just fine. I believed that Government was good and that public servants served the public. That those sworn To Protect and Serve would protect and serve.



I've grown up, though. I've seen what real coconuts look like. I've held good people as their life drained out through bullet holes; I've listened to children with downcast eyes lie about the bruises on their bodies to protect the only 'love' they've ever known. I've watched men die on Youtube because of the color of their skin. I've had the hard realities of this life grind the prism of my vision so that I can see the complexities that I never would have appreciated from the perspective of the worn green carpet from which a young boy wondered why they couldn't find some plumber who could fix that Watergate once and for all or find some planes and bring our boys home. I've learned through the years that even when the boys do come home, it's never truly the same home they left behind, and that the past I believed in was not even the past I thought it was.

So I can't go home. And that lawn jart studded patch of weeds is just a bioelectric pattern buried somewhere inside three pounds of human brain tissue. Yet somewhere in those three pounds there is also a compass, a compass structured not of steel but fashioned from the beyond-the-years and beyond-the-horizons wisdom of a gentle country preacher known to most as Norman Groves, but known to me simply as Pastor. By the long under-appreciated guidance of an exasperated single mother, administered faithfully through equal parts parental advice, industrious example, and the very necessary application of leather to bottom. A compass grounded in a faith that the years have only strengthened and the latitudes have only validated.

A compass that leads me, not to a better place, but- God willing- leads me to become a better man.

A compass that guides me as I try to build what my children will one day remember as home.