WE OBSESS ABOUT AGE BUT DON'T VALUE TIME

collaborative poem from Carrie Hill and Prudence Brooks

WE OBSESS ABOUT AGE BUT DON’T VALUE TIME 
(a collaboration by Carrie Hill & Prudence Brooks)

Remember when days and weeks seemed boundless?
Jumping rope once felt like growing wings,
time metered out in blushing dawns
and fading dusks.
Seconds marked by the
tap-tap-tap
of Sunday shoes on sidewalks
and echoes of Miss Mary Mack floating
on warm April winds.

All that required our attention
was dripping popsicles,
whose turn it was at hopscotch,
which house we were reporting to
when the street lights opened their twilight eyes.

Whatever happened to taking joy instead of waiting for it?

Now, there resides an eerie stillness
where the fruits of simple summers wither,
puckering like persimmons at first frost.
Scattered amid skeletons of leaves
lies Miss Mary Mack’s rotting remains.

The jump rope, long abandoned,
frays in a decrepit schoolyard
and children no longer romp
over the crumbled rubble
where the old video store once sat.

No one finds catharsis in carnage anymore.