Captain and Mother Too

 

My cleve poem (actually two poems that can be read together to create a third poem)  here is dedicated to the memories of Bob Keesham, my mother Valerie, and the magic of childhood imagination.  Bob is better known by all my countrymen as Captain Kangaroo, a friend and icon in children’s television long before Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers came along.  He once said that as a child he would play with his mother’s box of stray buttons in the sandbox and pretend they were “ships at sea or Hannibal moving across the Alps.”  Imagination is so very important to everyone, but especially to us, the poets.

I hope that you will enjoy my first attempt at a cleave poem and please tell me what you think…..  Thank you for stopping by…..   – John

P.S… Please accept my apologies..  anyone viewing this with MS Internet Explorer might have had problems seeing the poem itself, which is in a table and was a bit off center in MSIE…  It should be corrected now…  I’m a Firefox fan and didn’t check it in MSIE before publishing…

Listen along as I read this poem………     

Imagination, gorging my mind like	–	A box of mama’s buttons
Shimmering bits of ivory and wood,	–	Scattered across the sand.
Telling tales of brave adventure,	–	Of life, of love, and dreams,
As sailors rage the seven seas.	–	Drowned away in a distant time.
Teddy’s soldiers atop San Juan,	–	Singing songs of blue despair,
And Napoleon’s great flare,	–	Ending in tragedy,
Oh the realm of quest and glory!	–	A soft copper casket lowers,
A thousand men before me cried	–	And her buttons fade away,
If only to be a child, forever	–	My friend, forever.

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Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.

–          T. S. Eliot

© 2011 John Richter