2015-2016, Poem

Sandboxes and Prisms

Featured in the 2015 Fall Issue of Rambunctious

Sandboxes and Prisms
Afua Addo, '16

Technically speaking they used to be children
but life became more like the ocean
and less like their backyards, pushing and pulling
pushing and pulling them
into the deep
deeply changing the shape of their minds
making the world more like a prism and less like a sphere
deep
now their hair is wet and
so are their feet
feet that just learned to walk
pushed to fly
flying with what they had always looked up to see
seeing that their youth was stolen
they cry
they cry for their sand box playmates Childhood
and Innocence that stopped holding their hands
hands that made castles of sand make weapons now
now the robbed children hurt each other
others become familiar things
and things become indecipherable
when they are bent by prisms.

Nothing is the same because you can’t
unsee something, anything
you cannot unlearn something
something has changed
change is good
but badly in need of a constant
imagine being robbed
by the world that welcomed you in
to a world where there are no sandboxes
boxes and people are lost in quicksand
quick to become tombstones and return to earth
a funny place
placed so eloquently in the sky floating
and spinning floating and
spinning us around
and around we go
going nowhere
what a design
designed to teach you
that no one can stop this mass in the sky
from spinning
from stopping

So stop stopping then
because then your youth was taken
and now it is gone
gone were the days where you knew nothing
but what your eyes greeted in the morning
but it’s morning time to wake
up and smell to roses.
Yes darkness outshines the morning
in the evening but the sun never stops
raising
so rise like the sun.