Damian Finn

Pity the child that hasn’t played at the foot of a gilded stream

dancing on a wave thrown dappled darkness, digging recalcitrant sand,

secretly measuring time and life’s worth by a dying sun’s gleam.

Pity the child too haltered by visitant sin, or nature’s cruel happenstance,

to pitch a stone at an incoming wave, beat barefoot retreat from the fanned

fingers of foam hungrily clawing escapes’ last chance.

Pity the child whose journey, dust to dust, is a festering crowd

of signs and symbols, made-up and borrowed, too obscure to hand

a meaning to reason; a meaning common good sense has allowed.

Pity the child that stays at the edge of a drab and drabbled beach

with a tide that never turns from low, and where the glow on the strand,

from a shrouded midnight moon, is muted by mud and mind’s reach.

Pity, too, the adult the child, circumstance, uncommon sense and signs have reared

to linger at the edge of a reason having a credo of understood purpose revered.

Pity, though, the most, folk that fetter what they cannot fathom with a calibrated ‘I’;

forgetting they can play at the foot of a gilded stream with a dying sun in the sky.

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