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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476639" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>I Keep Returning To This Line In My Childhood</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I keep returning to this line in my childhood <br>I once stood in one dreaded day <br>every month with my mother <br>to prove I was loyal and reliable, <br>waiting for food at what was <br>back in the late fifties<br>called the Foodstall. <br>Though we were not animals. <br>We were simply poor <br>at the mercy of the God-wielding charities<br>and though it’s nowhere near the same degree<br>as it is of kind, we almost felt<br>like natives in the hands of the Catholic church.<br>Mostly separated mothers left in the lurch of love <br>with two or three whining kids <br>that were plague rats of measles, <br>mumps, ringworm, and cold sores, <br>agitated as electrons wanting to jump orbitals. <br>Natives, dried-out rummies <br>with faces like desiccated orange peels, <br>more alcoholics than druggies back in those days, <br>the addle-brained with psyches like quicksand <br>they kept falling into, some lambs <br>and some the tigers <br>that wouldn’t lie down with them. <br>Lonely bachelors that came out <br>of their self-imposed exiles <br>once a month to this lottery of foodstuffs <br>they carried home in a big brown <br>Vancouver refinery two ply paper white sugar bag <br>stitched together like the parched skins of mummies, <br>as if they were carrying a woman back to their place<br>like one of the Sabine maidens they’d snatched<br>to populate Rome with their solitude.<br>Women with too much make-up on, <br>a lot of them bruised, <br>their black eyes waxing from dark blue <br>to the festering yellow of ruined orchids, <br>as my mother’s used to <br>before my old man left for good.<br>A few boisterous madames <br>with chameleonic hair <br>that changed colour every month, <br>laughing and talking too loud <br>as if to show the more righteous among mothers <br>how free and flamboyant and flaunting they were<br>in the face of anyone’s disapproval, <br>as if they always had a trick up their sleeve, <br>though that wasn’t always the case <br>or they wouldn’t be standing there with us.<br>I keep returning to this line in my childhood <br>as if it held me no matter <br>how hard I’ve struggled to get off it<br>like a spinal cord tied to a kite and a key <br>that’s dangerously exposed to the lightning. <br>Shame. Humiliation. Guilt. <br>Though God knows for what <br>when you’re a child <br>trying to figure out what you did, <br>thinking you must be evil because you can’t. <br>Three hundred people lined up for hours <br>like a caterpillar that went around the block<br>exposed to public scrutiny <br>that felt it had a right to stare <br>because they were doing their share<br>and from the looks of things, we weren’t. <br>though I saw what bleach can do <br>to a woman’s knees and knuckles <br>when she was trying to raise four kids <br>by scrubbing a rich woman’s floors.<br>There are bitter moments in life <br>that can burn holes in your heart<br>like the Taliban splashing acid <br>in the eyes of a young girl who can read.<br>My mother could paint. <br>But not with her hands bleeding and raw.<br>Not with her mind and heart <br>scorched with anxiety<br>like a hot iron branding an ironing board <br>like another steer in the herd.<br>Even writing about it <br>I am depressed by the ferocity <br>of my boyish helplessness fifty years later, <br>as I stand beside her <br>to help her carry the bag home, <br>slabs of black bear meat <br>with tufts of hair still on it<br>haemorrhaging through the paper, <br>that would rip open <br>like the stitching of a wound<br>in the side of the lunar bull of abundance <br>Mithras Tauroctonus killed, <br>partially bruised vegetables and fruit, <br>usually a small bag of day old donuts, <br>two loaves of bread, leprous margarine<br>with a packet of orange dye <br>to mix into it for a little local colour, <br>sugar and canned spaghetti, <br>macaroni with powdered cheese, <br>brown potatoes sprouting <br>virginal green tendrils for tails<br>that made them like giant sperm, <br>would come pouring out of it<br>and scatter all over the sidewalk <br>to deepen the spectacle <br>of our monthly fertility ritual.<br>Everything was second hand, <br>even our food. <br>Even the way we felt about ourselves <br>for living the way we had to.<br>Everything shabby, used, abused <br>with an aura of ruin about it <br>you couldn’t get out of your heart, <br>your psyche, your clothes, <br>like the smell of death <br>in the upholstery of a car <br>where someone had died at the wheel<br>at the side of the road three days ago. <br>Street shrinks by seven, <br>pessimist philosophers by eleven, <br>even the children reeking of experience, <br>their innocence rooted like mushrooms<br>that came up overnight <br>in the compost heaps of life.<br>I stood like a pawn beside <br>the dethroned queen of my mother<br>and thought one day all this will be reversed <br>and those who were blessed <br>and didn’t pass it on <br>would later be cursed for realizing <br>too late the hard way, <br>that you really can’t hang on to anything <br>in this world of change, <br>this cosmic hour glass<br>shaped like lungs, <br>the valves of the heart<br>that keep reversing themselves, <br>that you haven’t already given away<br>just like your last breath <br>to make room for more.<br>Even in the spring, <br>even in the sweltering heat of summer, <br>wet winter days when the leaves <br>were plastered like collages <br>of artists in despair to the sidewalks, <br>after the cross burnt the scarecrow <br>as the strawdog of an idolatrous heretic, <br>we were always the last birds allowed in <br>to glean what was left of Eden, <br>before the hunger of winter <br>closed it down again and the tourists <br>went home to their homelessness with the poor.<br>And the seagulls and the mice <br>and the feral cats and the rats <br>that always seemed to have <br>so much more right to be there than we did<br>waiting for the loaves and fishes <br>to be broken on the hillside <br>though we were made to stand for hours <br>on heel-numbing cement designed <br>to torment your feet by standing <br>in place too long as the line <br>inched its way up the the front <br>like a millipede of people <br>growing nasty and impatient <br>to get what they needed to get <br>of what was left, then get gone <br>as fast as they could not to belong <br>to the bottom feeders in the same lifeboat <br>they’ve just been standing among. <br>And though my mother didn’t say much, <br>standing there in her isolationist silence, <br>there was always a troupe <br>of housewives in kerchiefs, <br>turning the trivial gossip of a reality show <br>into a running sore soap opera <br>they improvised from one end of the line <br>right up to the time the door opened <br>to let them in and they left the stage <br>to get down to the serious busy <br>of picking out the best turnips <br>and the less stale loaves of bread <br>suspecting the Elk’s Lodge ladies <br>had stashed the freshest for themselves<br>as a spiritual perk for all their altruism <br>that remotely tasted like vinegar<br>mixed with the deathly sweetness <br>of the canned milk of human kindness<br>as if one too many flies and angels <br>had dipped their wings in it<br>so that by the time it got to us <br>or we to it, it was an albino oil slick<br>from a cow that jumped over the moon <br>in total eclipse. Circus tricks, <br>hoops of fire with ringmasters<br>the barnyard made the caged tigers <br>jump through once a month<br>through the endless zeroes <br>of a slinky wound around the block<br>that had swallowed all of us heart first<br>like a multi-headed hydra <br>with a bellyful of hungry people<br>in a line that’s only grown longer over the years.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476639" data-title="I Keep Returning To This Line In My Childhood de Patrick White" data-description="I keep returning to this line in my childhood 
I once stood in one dreaded day 
every month with my mother 
to prove I was loyal and reliable, 
waiting for food at what was 
back in the late fifties
called the Foodstall. 
Though we were not animal..."></div>
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