Memory Better than Sunny Daydream’s Ocean

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

“And by mere playing go to heaven” ~ Henry Vaughan, “Childhood” in Silex Scintillans (1655)

It is as if the river has submerged

My boyhood.  All the leaves around my home

Are covered with the flow of water.  Purged

Of mere reality beneath the dome

Of orange grove sky, these leaves and palm fronds, though,

Are heatless.  They are covered with the light

Of memory, light with remembrances’ glow.

As mere as this all is, it brings delight

Perhaps because the mereness makes things clean,

Much cleaner than the sunlight that the child

Endured.  The citrus groves were white and green

Before the fruit came.   Now the scene’s restyled.

  It is as if the Indian River cleans

    The cosmos with perfection’s sheens.

© Phillip Whidden