TOWER OF BRICKS.

I sat on the floor with you,

Little open hearted boy of just gone two,

Your innocent laughter bringing unalloyed joy

To one who wondered just what toy

You were playing with or what it was that made you chuckle so

I knew that, given time, I’d know.

You had constructed for yourself a tower made out of bricks

My fingers, creeping along the carpet, just like walking match sticks until they found the tower’s base

Your little face

What did it say? Did you smile or did you frown

As I knocked your little tower of bricks down

And heard them scatter as they created their noise

Destroying the handiwork of little boys

Or at least one

You laughed until I almost cried with laughter too

Then, catching my breath I said to you

“Come on! Build me the tower again”

I intended to knock it down once more since doing so had caused you little pain

But rather made us laugh.

Patiently you went to work once more,

In your lovely little eyes was the tower a castle?

A sky scraper with gleaming windows

And a golden door?

Did it house soldiers whose battles were bloody and long

Or was it a refuge for the weak who are no longer strong?

On the command “ready”!

My unerring hands went into action a second time

And in a moment sublime

And with a shout of:

“Down you go”!

I destroyed the army’s hide out

Or perhaps the castle

Or the refuge from the foe,

And just as I predicted we laughed again as I urged you to rebuild,

You, so infantile and yet so skilled

At building your construction and making me a thing

Which I could nock down until our laughter

Made the rafters of the house you lived in sing.

This image – This memory

Of a little boy and tower I could not see

Stays in my mind where it has been for years.

You – Little nephew of a now dead friend,

Is frozen in time like a picture taken by a camera’s lens,

Now you are grown I hear and driving a car

Somewhere in Liverpool

That’s where you are

And I am probably long forgotten as you were much too young to know

How happy you made me and that I love children so.

My tower of bricks has taken long to grow.

It has to withstand the gales, the rain and snow.

Sometimes people come up to its windows, have a peep

At the lone occupant within who, company with the solitude must keep.

People throw “pebble words” at the windows

And try to break the glass

Or simply go to their own towers of constructed thought, they hurry with their eyes closed as they pass.

Only by not reaching out with their hands causes my tower to fall,

Their hands of indifference destroys and damages it all

And the rubble lands on my soul and I do not laugh

As the scars that form cut my soul in half.

I wave at their towers’ windows but know the battle’s lost

When they think it not worthwhile to wave back at my glass of frost which fills up my window pane,

They think my tower will fall on them

Overwhelming them with rubble,

Swamping them or

Worse still

Forcing them to rebuild their towers again,

And I wonder, were I to meet the man I once knew as a little boy

Would you “arms length” me?

Or laugh with me over something we had in common

Thereby once more giving me that rare,

That spare,

That not often felt but longed for unalloyed joy?