Nostalgia

[Mahjong]

This is lovely anapestic tetrameter. Seems almost perfect to me, except perhaps for the second line of the third stanza, where I get tripped up a tiny bit on 'Joan'--maybe a single syllable name, if I'm reading the line correctly (and I might not be): "like the [butch]er's wife [Flo] who would [pack]age our [meat]" (I just realized that this is not Jo-an--it's Joan, as in Joan of Arc :-). Also, and just a passing observation, the topographical imagery of the first stanza is a tiny bit cluttered to me; I have a little trouble picturing all that stuff on a bluff, and how 'feet' might pass there between your bench and the lake. Again, minor point. I really like how in each stanza the opening imagery of innocence becomes mediated by a touch of miasma at the end--the grey lake, the drunk dad, the stillborn sheep. Where one could try to capture these darker clouds with a variation in the meter, I think their rolling in under the easy and enjoyable anapestic beat creates just the right amount of qualifying dissonance appropriate to nostalgia. Thanks for this poem!

From a bench on a bluff in a park off a street
with a school and a church and a mill that ground wheat,
there’s a view of a lake that’s so grey and so bleak
that I’d sit and pretend I was looking at feet.

There’s a field by the shops where the children would play
with our baseballs and bats ‘til one mother would say
“All you kids should go home, or there’ll be hell to pay”
but my dad was a drunk, and could not be waylaid.

There were folks in the town that were folksy and sweet
like the butcher’s wife Joan who would package our meat,
who opined with a smile that our cut was unique
having been the hind leg of a stillborn black sheep.