Childhood Lost

CHILDHOOD LOST


High on the chilly windblown crag, childhood is tarnished:

powerlessness and fear hang in the air like shades of dark.

This trusting spirit child, so full of generous ease,

no longer views her Lilliputian world through hazy,

carefree hues of innocence; but travels now, with hesitance

on tippy-toes, while ....flight, shouts and screams shreak -

discordant notes from every fibre of her being.



A threatening ‘otherness’presses;

menace hovers in the fractured shadows,

nooks and crannies where she plays her

childish games of make-belief and mayhem.



She shifts from innocence and childish play....

too late she minds her mother’s call

"take care my dear, be home by dark.

She bolts like lightning down the scree,

emerging from the crags on to the road.



The terrace, shines wet and lowering;

chimneys plume ; glowing windows beckon -

like familiar beacons on a hill.

Arms wide stretched wait to draw

this child of love and nurture in.


Her identity fractures yet

into shades of grey, while

fear become a token currency

and trust is forever lost.


Isabel Telford

April 2008

Kaleidoscope

The Golden Book of Astronomy illuminates my bookcase still,
‘An Introduction to the Wonders of Space’
given me at five years old by my parents
playing out their own Wars of the Worlds in our lounge room.

I wanted a bride doll and had prepared her space
on a shelf near the window. No marital bed for her.
She would inhabit my room in a perpetual state of readiness
for her phantom groom:
my doppelgänger, drawn in Derwents and denied materiality.

Resigned to my loss
I quickly found the planets offered more escape.
Rings more interesting than a bridal band were Saturn’s
and the clouds of Venus moved across the page
as gracefully as a wedding dress through ether.

Mercury burned and the canals of Mars were dry. No matter.
They held the infinite possibilities of farness and survival.
Light years fell away in my room in Delbridge Street.
The moons of Jupiter were more like home.

In Room 40B of Brighton Nursing Home a shaft of light
strikes the glass beside my bed.
Prisms of memory pierce at unexpected moments
reducing me to tears, or worse,
non compos mentis.

I am eight years old and running with Spike
through the Fitzroy streets, away from Dad,
towards the stars and Jupiter.


Cathy McCallum