Arms And A Boy Poem by Roger elkin

Bump, and in he comes, my son, my six-year-old lump
of boydom, trundling through the door, his arms
a heaving sheaf of blue, so full the colour hides his eyes.
“Bluebells, Mum, ” and the pulled stems bundle in my hands.
Unlike him, they’re lean and thin, their greenness
seeping anaemically to white where light has never seen before
and sap is dripping down his grubby nails.
Heavy with flower, their heads hang with bells
of fragile blues that smudge to purple at their rims.
The only sound they ring is scent that drowns the dining-room.

“Been stung, ” he boasts, then keens. And thrusts his knee
with its perfect nettle-mounds, white-islands in the smear
of dockleaves he hurriedly applied. But it’s Mum
he needs. As I apply the calamine, he rubs his cheek
against my dangling hair, and puts his arms around my neck.
Then, leaving me with foolish swabs of cotton-wool, he
rushes out to terrorize the garden with his gun.

How can I explain to him his gift would better be
if left to grow, when in the lounge I arrange chrysanthemums
his father’s brought? And how offset the hope that when
he’s grown he’ll have no need for gun, with expectation
that as a man he’ll greet his Mum with larger arms
that spill with cultivated blooms? Bemused, I plunge
his present in a glass, and start the tea. He is so young.

At times like these you have to play the game; forget hypocrisy.