Poetry: The Marbles We Lost to Time

Passing time… As it left, it stole so many of our things.

And merely handed us the count of growing age upon our fingers.

Now I cannot remember the last time shaved ice colored crimson on my tongue,

or how we dissolved into laughter during games of hide-and-seek with the moon.

I have forgotten the wild joy of letting the monsoon wet us completely,

two paper boats trembling in roadside streams, carrying our secret wishes

toward a childhood we believed would never end.

Now I don’t remember, when the last time was

that I chased cottonwood fluff flying in the wind,

Or wasted the golden afternoons trying to catch butterflies.

Even the memory of sleeping without any worries in my mother’s lap,

her fingers drawing rivers through my hair,

has become a distant shore I can no longer reach.

I never even realized when life replaced the marbles in my hands,

With a heavy bundle of responsibilities.

As they left, the growing age took some things away with it forever,

And now, it has only left behind their memories…

With every passing season, the child inside grows quieter,

until one day we wake to find it gone… replaced by this careful, colorless

stranger who calls itself maturity.

And now we walk bent,

necks bowed under the architecture of adulthood, eyes fixed upon the cracked pavement of duty.

We have forgotten how to look up, how the sky was once a generous page

waiting for our clouds to become dragons.

Most accept this theft without protest. They name it “growing up” and move on.

But some of us still feel the hollow where wonder used to live.

We know the secret:

The most sacred thing a soul can carry into old age

is a small, stubborn, untamed piece of childhood

kept alive like a firefly in a jar of glass and memory.