Growing Pains, Devin Welsh

GROWING PAINS

Devin Welsh

After “The Train Speaks” from Eve Ewing’s book, 1919

“They look / for a lash that isn’t there, even them that never felt it.” It was in the way he moved: rigid, waiting, but ready to Leap at a moment’s notice. In a word, Fear.

“Even now, I dream of them,” Days spent climbing trees And scratching stories into dirt. Tree sap-palms that molded worlds.

“They are safe within but can see without.” Eyes peeled at the windowsill, Neighborhood kids playing at my basketball hoop. We could have been friends.

“They feel it before they know the words,” We treaded around it carefully and clumsily, Stomped all over it before we knew what we had, And have been putting it back together slowly every day since.

“I can never take you home. You have none.” It isn’t a place, it’s a feeling. Someone can take that feeling from you, But it can be born again.

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