Lost Childhood, by Michael Estabrook

Nanumett Shores, by Lisa McCarthy (USA). Contemporary. Click on image for artist website.

Lost Childhood

1
In the house we grew up in there was only
a dark cubbyhole for our memories and the secrets
of our lost childhoods the Hardy Boys books,
Kerry's Lionels, Todd's blocks and dried out baseball
mitts, the sax I played in the stupid band.

2
Returning to their home town after 25 years
was surreal. They got lost trying to get to
the high school. The ice cream stand they worked in
was now a dry cleaners, while Old Smith’s Farm
was gone altogether.

3
I find Kerry upstairs
in his room in the old Northfield Avenue house
in the far corner at his desk
so absorbed in writing something he doesn’t see
or hear me and I can’t get his attention.

Michael Estabrook

Michael Estabrook is a recently retired baby boomer child-of-the-sixties poet freed finally after working 40 years for “The Man” and sometimes “The Woman.” No more useless meetings under florescent lights in stuffy windowless rooms. Now he’s able to devote serious time to making better poems when he’s not, of course, trying to satisfy his wife’s legendary Honey-Do List.