Broken Little Chairs Poem by Liilia Talts Morrison

They're gone now. Little children
Dressed in white and pink and blue.
We, the chairs, the cribs, the well-worn hymnals
Are left only to remember.
The children are grown now.
They stopped listening.

There was a time
When the lectern, the cross,
The chalkboard brought fear
To those trusting faces.

Today, what does it matter?
There are real things to do.
Cars, bills, people fill their lives.

What does it matter if feathers from a forgotten bird
Lie on an old wooden chair?
Or that a ping-pong ball
No longer bounces on the table,
Or a clumsy wooden cross hides in the dark?

We are the broken little chairs.
But pity us not, for the new,
The big, the shiny, the grown up
Is not at all what we seek?

We only ask that you leave us
In this darkened room
So we can dream our always dreams:
Those little faces, hands and feet
And what they sang and did and didn't do.
That's all we ask today.
For tomorrow, the furnace and the scrap heap.