Lost Child

It wasn’t the classroom dumbness backed with threats
or those sullen vacuums round the dinner table
that  could turn a meal to sorbo in his mouth,
but silence, white space, wind sleeking a hillside,
those were the gifts that made childhood feel like home.

I  still keep an eye out for him, that bookish, solitary boy.
At midday, maybe, over sun-baked fields,
along a barely boot-wide track between wild hyacinths
and mossy, fallen trees, or while a heron, stoic
in the bitter cold, ignores me from across a frozen lake.

Ken Head

If you have any comments on this poem, Ken Head  would be pleased to hear them.