painting by Elena Zlatomrezova
The vine crept up oaks behind the altar and snuck around like the neighbor cat. Children called them purple flowers and adolescents imagined them as grapes. Rain soaked grass and sprinklers battering boys with pudgy bellies. I don’t remember them going away. Did they run off? Were they killed? The altar’s smashed to pieces. Glow worms and fireflies burnt in June’s nighttime humidity that foiled M.’s curls. I smashed the altar with a sledge hammer and buried the fragments. The lightpost shines at the intersection; it's a hilltop and we rode bikes down the hill. He rode down once and flew over the handlebars bloodying his nose and ruining my two-speed. Pecans fall like wisteria and the altar. Bumblebees follow these into the front yard to the muhly grass and purple flowers. The neighbor cat, Kasper, still stalks our backyard where the Wisteria used to grow above the altar.
Reflection:
I wrote this poem last summer, and as this summer approaches I thought I’d pull it back out. There used to be wisteria that grew in my parent’s backyard right above an old stone table (Aslan’s table). I’m not quite sure where the stone table came from, but it always carried a certain mythic significance. At the end of my high school years, we broke down the table so we could use that part of the garden for something else.
This poem is trying to capture the loss of, maybe we’ll call it, childhood imagination. However, throughout the poem there are various things—glowworms, fireflies, pecans, and most importantly the cat, Kasper—that persist. The pecans fall yearly, the fireflies and glowworms burn yearly, and the cat continues on at the end of the poem just like the beginning. Despite the loss of childhood excitements, magical elements continue to return. The altar might be gone, but it lives on in my imagination and these signs imbue it with new life.
I hope you enjoy this poem!