This Game with the Wheel and Stick
The whiff of exultance stirs the maladroit pace
Of the mantling clouds of the noon-time haze,
‘Twas another dance for the buckling dusts
Beneath the fluttering canopy of the jaunty slugs
Of feet and the tinkering gist these children seek
In playing this game with the wheel and stick;
Beating the corpulent ring with a stick up the hill
And down need not steer the unfettered wheel
In the innocuous charade, my resilience trampled
As I heard the wails of the shattering scaffold
Oh, what a picturesque scene bloats the meadows
While these children fondle the stick and the wheel wallows;
The joie de vivre that inveigles the unclothed sun,
The glissando phase that cloys the assiduous wand
And the same impetus that conveys the wheel in miles
Could only taint a scarce desire in my lifeless smiles
The system is simple: participate but do not topple
Pound the wheel with the stick and veer quite supple
And the wheel shall roll with the frothing chortles
While the stick hang loosely in chasing the dawdle
Over and over, the stick shall thrust the cavalcade
While sating in the wheel's travails and the giggling serenade
Pummeling and pummeling but never setting farther
Gobbling the friction in a farce quite harder
Of course you haven't followed my sympathy for the stick
For you have never been at the fringes of the creek
Have you seen the hands that suffocates the baton
And how it vied to hold back in its chaffed complexion?
For in the master plan it is but a tepid fire
That shall ignite the cloaked potency of a quagmire
And never an expedition without the trimmings of surfeit,
And never the buoyant rolling in the grasses of fate.
poem by Norman Santos
Added by Poetry Lover
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