Nostalgia

[Mahjong]

Hi Wjames! I have some thoughts for you on this one:

From a bench on a bluff in a park off a street -- from, on, in, off....all prepositional phrases stacked on top of each other, it's a bit of an overload of that construction
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 -- the first three lines don't contain a single word that is more than one syllable. I suspect it's because you're trying to be careful about the meter, but the relentlessly simple words make it sound like a children's book.
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” -- the stress falls on "be," which feels unnatural, especially since I would naturally emphasize "hell" in the phrase 'hell to pay.' I certainly wouldn't emphasize "pay" unless there was a fabulous reason. 
but my dad was a drunk, and could not be waylaid. -- here the stress is supposed to fall at the end right? That would make it say wayLAID, but I've always heard it pronounced WAYlaid.

There were folks in the town that were folksy and sweet -- folks were folksy? I'm sure that they were, but the repetition doesn't sound intentional, it sounds like an error. I'd probably replace folksy with something else, since it can be easily inferred that folks are folksy, and so you could take the opportunity to modify folks with another appropriate adjective.
like the butcher’s wife Joan who would package our meat, -- lordy, I have a dirty mind....
who opined with a smile that our cut was unique -- someone's 'cut' can refer to their physique, and that combined with the meat reference.....hopefully it's just me.
having been the hind leg of a stillborn black sheep. -- my rational mind would not let me interpret "having been" as modifying "Joan" or "who" but rather "cut," which is the intent I assume. Still, grammatically it could be read as though she used to be the hind leg, or even that the speaker had been as well.

It's a very sweet piece, bordering on saccharin in a few places.

I wonder if my mind is looking for a joke or a punch line because of the meter being so pronounced, as it often is in satirical pieces.

Anyway, I hope something in here helps.

Best,

lizziep

Love these comments by Lizziep.  I learned so much from them!  I just wanted to add one general thought: I actually love the 'double entendre' (as it were) that Lizziep points out (whereas she seems to suggest--"hopefully it's just me"--that they 'might' be problematic, though I might be wrong here).  My sense is that this kind of 'double entendre' is a natural (charming, alluring) always-simmering substrate of these folksy lifeworlds, where on the surface social intercourse (no pun intended here) insists on being so fastidiously saccharin (they're folksy, yes, but they're also human).  That the poem, so simple overall, manages to preserve this simmering substrate is a virtue, to my mind.  That said, I don't believe that said preservation legitimates the grammar ambiguity that Lizziep astutely points out.