Do you Remember?
Jennifer Francesca Acio

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Do you remember

When we used to sit

Around the smouldering faggots

With anxious eyes

Glued to mama’s aromatic cauldron?

Awe-struck by the glistening stars

That seemed to hold our future?

 

How about the odysseys

Through the village jungle

The endless skirmishes through the village square,

And the hide and seek we played:

Do you remember them?

 

Those girlish coquettish giggles

As we pranced in agility

Our pots balancing elegantly on our heads,

As we headed to the stream

To the envy of village dudes,

Do you remember them?

When my brother called you wife

It was to you like strife,

And you were filled with rage,

Because you weren’t of age!

Do you remember how bitterly you cried?

Then, we were littl’uns,

Aspiring doctors, lawyers, engineers,

Eager to unearth the world of the big’uns.

All reality was unreal,

And all else so surreal!

Our innocent dreams

Lay in our innocent brains

We saw every corrective treatment as a punitive one,

And questioned all acts of justice

For to us those were injustices.

 

But all that is in the past

Now we are mature, full grown adults.

Let’s let go of the naiveté.

Adjust to our today and stash away our yester years.

For is it for nothing life is called bitter-sweet?

It offers both gall and honey.

It is embroidered with thorn-infested roses,

Running through gullies and peaks.

 

Now that we are of age,

Bitter reality we must ingest.

No more coy giggles

Born of meaningless tickles.

No more leisure at the stream,

For life is so fast we can miss the cream.

No more hide and seek,

For you might get lost forever.

And even though you were sleek

You might just cause another palaver.

 

My teenage friend,

You are still my friend,

But times have changed

And we must swim with the tide.

You cannot go on bouncing forever,

Nor can you go on day dreaming forever.

Stir from the dream and live its nightmare.

Emerge from the cocoon of fear

And stare stark reality in its face.

Unearth the scum

And clean it apiece a time

Stop singing songs of yester years

For lamentation begets sorrow.

Live in the present,

And stop conjuring up images of the past

 For those, my friend, were just dreams.

Jennifer Francesca Acio is a Master's candidate at the University for Peace. This poem was originally published in Roar Magazine, and is reprinted with the author's permission.

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