It Was The Summer of Sixty-Two
Walking along the railroad tracks,She jumped from cross tie to cross tie.
Flat-footed, she would jump,
As her daddy showed how to do.
"You can do it. Use your strong leg muscles.
"Crouch like a tiger, then pounce!" he would tell her.
And she did. Just like Daddy asked.
It was a thrill. She was invincible.
Today she jumped alone.
Today she was in her own world of thoughts.
A lion tamer in the circus!
Caught up in the dreams of the child she was.
"I am the tamer; I am the lion, the tiger" she thought.
She crouched low, sweat dripping from her boy cut bangs.
Then a leap, then another and another!
Way past where she should be.
Alone, on a hot summer's day, at least a mile from her home.
Her tenth birthday was coming up on the first day of August.
She wasn't thinking about birthdays, though.
She was scared.
She had never gone this far before.
The sun was setting,
Giving an almost orange eerie glow to the sky.
"Like a fire," she said to herself.
She was scared of fires. Hell was full of fire.
She turned to run back to familiar places.
She turned and ran into the man with the fire in his hand.
It was the summer 1962, a time of uncertainty, upheaval.
Of riding bikes, of playing Hide and Seek.
Yes, it was a time of innocence for her,
For the soul of the Kat, Kathy, the little girl.
She who loved her daddy and mommy,
And her dog Husky.
She cried when he went away and never came back.
She tried to sing a song, a poem about him, but she cried.
That's all she could do, cry.
And that's what she was about to do
Just now, looking into the face of a demon from Hell.
"He came out of that open sewer by the Donohue's house!
"I know he did. Those dragonflies feed the snakes from hell.
"He's a snake from hell!"
The words flew like bats through her brain.
She tried to make sense of what she saw.
Nothing made sense from then on. Nothing.
She was in a whorl of dust and rock,
Dragged backwards, farther away from her home.
Her world of lions and tigers were long gone.
She now was in the world of his making.
It was a world of lost imaginations.
A world where reality and innocence no longer were friends,
But, that wasn't the end, my friend, that was not the end!.
Poetry by Kathy Lockhart
Read 611 times
Written on 2006-08-26 at 06:23
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