There are places we knew in childhood:
green grass blankets sprinkled with dew diamonds and early June blooms,
chocolate warmth of cocoa on a January day, the sweet smell of summer sweat,
 the sound of the drums coming
from far away for an Independence Day parade,
the paragraph in a book you know you’ll never forget.
 
Oh, the cold crush of flakes forming winter’s first snowball,
or the golden sparks of a clambake fire, such stories
told round the circle there
with the tang of salt sea spray perfuming the air.
 
So many pictures we all recall and hold them sacred still.
Yet tell me why of all of these
not one can take the place
of a certain day when fate decreed I’d look
and see your face.


© by Arlene Gay Levine.
Used here with permission.