Beyond Steel
Porches ridicule and humiliate no longer.
All afternoons are opportune.
United neighbours sit and sip
Idly on sun seared stoops
As they are lovingly licked
With lovely licks:
Of youthful uke
Melody from freckled fretted fingers
And midday warmth.
While across the way
Reluctant parents solicit abduction
Sending infants spilling out of houses
To slosh about in the streets
And run untamed with the horde
Like anarchic elephants
Tramping under laundry lines
Where garments fly in mosaics
(The waving flags of this block),
And stampeding between the relatives of their rentals
For only one species exists here
And familial resemblances
Are buried behind vine
That Ancaster would call OVERgrown.
Overgreen.
Come night we wolves howl.
Beckoning Bengals with banjo,
Calling tomcats to rooftops.
Forever free to roam
Without a bed time
And finally hearing a curious alternative to:
Cars squealing and slamming shut
Bass gone low,
Prelude to:
Touch down of lover’s right
Leaving mother black as the night.
But me,
I’ve learned to see past steel.
Ben Robinson
I am a native Hamiltonian and now a 1st year Social Science student at McMaster. I like downtown, quesadillas, stringed instruments, fall, novellas, and climbing structures of any kind. I hope that one day I will be able to journey within the Arctic Circle.