Old Days
Old days gone
no more penny candy
and ten cent comic books
baseball all summer long
and barbecued lawns
and I hear these days no one waves
to the friendly engineer
he left on the midnight train
and the caboose carried with it
old days
Nostalgia is a funny thing. It plays tricks on you. What it does is takes all your bad grades in your life experiences and expunges them. The above poem is like that in a way. But it's really a treatise on youth. Even people born in the depression (my father and late mother were) look on their childhoods with good memories. At the time it was written and even today I consider it my best. My definition of a good poem is that it says the most in the least amount of words. This poem won an honorable mention in a contest for Best Student Poetry In New Jersey, 1987. This book is published somewhere, but I have yet to see it. I find giving prizes for poetry a little outrageous. It's like saying Frost was better than Wallace Stevens. Or that Robert Lowell was better than Anne Sexton. It's a matter of taste. Isn't it?
But I digress. This poem evoked memories from people of my generation. One of my ex girlfriends(they're all ex girlfriends now) gave it to her sister to read and she wept. Words are more powerful than you think.
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