The Greenness Of A Promised Holiday Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Sheets of empty music
Asleep by the lake-
An uncle who is a professor owns a house-
A religious man- the sun skates like a spider,
A web of hoary legs reveal the cracks
That science proved
Onto his life:
His house is on a hill, a steep slope populated
By bitter apples that never reach
Pubescence:
I roll down the slope, after I run away:
And as a child,
Stolen bicycles,
Eaten penny candy:
Runaway memories my son will never have:
Ghosts on the swing set
Of a place I do not know-

Snow fills his eyes,
As he counts his stolen toys-
Sun fills his memory,
And in the morning he looks away:
A family awaits him,
A job on a planet far away:
And voices that call, remembering the carnival
Boxes that sent themselves spinning such as whimsical
Fireworks from a playground of yesterday:

A graveyard lies at the bottom of the hill,
All of the tears of gods' angels gather there:
Feral things, such as fallen leaves:
And losing boys who cannot read the names of
The gravestones:

A cold love that clutches at her stone-drunken
Heart- a child is cursing
The looming planets stepping down like voyeurs
Through the gardens,
Bending the greenness of a promised holiday.