Cricket Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I am here to teach you how to draw
All the sad lines for children,
To make believe there is a sea who has
Adopted them into a world of singing paper
Upon whose unwritten surface they might
Reach out and find anything,
Like the finger prints of ghostly cousins
Somehow living in the watermarked rings
Of underwater forests,
Whose glossy canopy is flowing like swings,
Like mermaid’s uncut bangs,
And their parents coming home behind the
Twin headlights flooding after dusk,
Somewhat worn and cuffed from their years
Of outdoor labors;
Simple basket weavers and glass blowers,
The mortally pure care-givers returning to the swirling surf
To occupy them from those pages like an insect with the
Scrawling music the eyes first hear before it
Is given over to the full outfit of senses;
To which the calligraphies are singing,
Making believe that they can be anything,
That they might last forever chartreuse and weepy,
Naive like make-believe swans of their changeless beauty,
Everything surrounding them, circling,
And occupied by what strange vermillion burgeoning,
Until they are laid fully grown, smoky haired and
Lined, folded into beds out of water forever, but through it all
So preoccupied with the faerie land’s illusive enigma
Never having known that their sweet author has gone
Before them, over the swelling ditches, the caesuras
Where the rains tremble on branches above the gentle
Roof housing their parents restive,
And that now, too, they are called home,
Their thoughts so gently with them,
Breathless, yet somehow children still swimming the depths and shallows
Of that brightest world they have known.


~~~With thoughts of Lloyd Alexander