To All the Lost Things

To all the lost things,
And all the lost days,
To all the lost folks
Who meandered away.
To all the lost things,
And all the lost dreams,
To the family and friends,
Lost hopes and lost schemes.
To all the lost things,
And all the lost skills,
To all the lost health,
And the newfounded ills.
To all the lost things,

Which taught me too well, 

That to all those lost years,

I must bid a farewell.

bobby stevenson 2020

THING and the Big Blue Sea

It was inevitable that it would happen. Thing had started to grow up.

Sure he still sat at the cave mouth every night on the chance that that would be the very moment his mother and father returned. Yet something deep down told him that they weren’t coming back and that he was on his own, and he’d better do something about it.

He knew that life would have to change, that his dreams would also have to do the same. There had been that one perfect moment, probably one day when he packed his school books and got ready to walk down the hill when his mother had kissed him goodbye and his father had patted him on the head and said ‘make me proud’. The sorrowful thing was that there wasn’t a fanfare or a bell that tolled as you passed that perfect moment in your life.

Maybe there would be another perfect moment, perhaps if he met someone – but he wasn’t holding his breath. He knew that he had been born looking like his family but not like anyone else in the valley or at school. And he had suffered because of this, he had been called names, beaten on a couple of occasions, and most hurtful of all was being left out of parties and celebrations. It wasn’t the kids that didn’t want Thing there. It was their parents.

Thing had been taught in school that we were on a rock which travelled around the sun every year. If this had been a ship, we would have helped each other; we would have cared and nurtured each other. But this was a ship without a sea, and so folks and Things didn’t appreciate how fragile it all was. Perhaps if folks looked at the sky and treated the big blue yonder as a sort of sea, then maybe they would be kinder to one and other.

When Thing was small he had first seen his reflection in a mirror in school, and it had shocked him. He knew he looked like his parents, but he didn’t realise how different he looked from the other children. That night he had wondered if this distance between him and the others would last all his life.

He had made friends at school, and those friends had not seen any difference, but he had noticed, as he got older, that the children had started to carry prejudices and words built-to-hurt to school. They weren’t taught those words in school, so there must have been another type of schooling done at home, the school of hate.

He never really felt sorry for himself, but he did wonder what kind of God would have made him so different. Then as the years passed in school, he saw that others had their problems too; even if they all looked alike. Little Johnny had lost his brother in a war, Elsa had been made an orphan after a car crash, and little Craig had gotten a disease called cancer and had never returned to school.

Everyone was tested Thing realised. Everyone. So he decided that if he had learned anything, it was to be strong when folks bullied and attacked. That everything passes, and that there is more good in the world than bad and that some kids’ parents cripple their off-spring with lies and hate and that, thought Thing, was the worst kind of injury.

So that night, as the sun was setting, Thing looked at the sky and saw it for the first time as a sea, and he saw the clouds as the waves breaking. That was when he really appreciated that we were all on a big ship going around the sun and we couldn’t afford to let anyone or anything get lost along the way.

bobby stevenson 2019

Keep Going

You’ll make it, I know you will,
You’ve come too far and now is not the time.
If only you stopped and thought about it all
The walls you’ve climbed, all the troubles crossed
All the failures faced, all the little victories
Look into the eyes of those beside you
The woman at the table
The man in the street
It’s there, deep set perhaps - but there all the same,
The very same terror as you
A flicker of recognition in both your eyes and then you move on
So if they can live in temporary quiet desperation
Then so can you
And one day soon you’ll make it across
To where you can start again
I know you will
You’ve come too far, to stop.

bobby stevenson 2019