Though it looks so different it still feels like home to me
where you and I used to play, getting lost in our imagination
day after day while mother worried.
And John there with us, talking of friends getting shot in the leg,
the marsh fire (claiming he wasn't there that day),
and the old railroad tie fort built near Our Pond a generation ago,
all traces of which have long since sunk to the earth.
The insulators are made of rubber now, and there's a nice wooden bridge
where the culvert used to be. Our children running ahead, lagging behind,
gathering many a gathered flower, tossing many a tossed rock
off the railroad bridge, oblivious to the reminiscence of mothers and fathers.
(I never worried as a child that a train would come.)
And in watching them I feel the us of long ago like it was yesterday,
and I wrap the old feelings around me like a favorite coat,
warm against this new world.
This place is ours, where you and I were we long before we ever became you and me.
And there is where it remains forever unchanged.
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