Barbara Ras
How easy then, the fun house at Lincoln Park
before it grew into a field of weeds, you could buy
five tickets for a buck from a blank face in a booth
and enter the dark with your brother to be scared
by tilting floors, phony doors, corpses
bursting out of coffins, and once out into blue sky
run breathless to your mother and father, happy,
you could have called them salad days,
but why would you –no one in your family
had read Shakespeare—so you bought
French fries, doused them with malt vinegar,
the four of you, competing for your share
of potatoes improved by salt and grease,
and nothing in those early evenings free
of care could have prepared you
to be the last one left, the one
with grief to spare.
(From The Blues of Heaven)
Featured at The Red Wheelbarrow on 29 September 2022