The cries and screams of childhood games
charge through the sulphurous air
that lounges at the old swan pond.
Sometimes I swung on the swing so high
I could almost see the pond down there.
Here I swung on until disturbed by
the ranger coming with his evening order.
Now I look back at the still-revolving roundabout
over the wood-trellised park-gate,
suspecting more is locked away
than just a swing or roundabout.
The memories of our cries still leak
Through the imprisoning padlocked park-gate.
In his youth before the invention of Amazon, excess packaging and parcel tape, Stuart Larner worked in a book warehouse and learnt all the despatcher’s knots for tying up book parcels with string. Subsequently he became a psychologist and wrote scientific papers, articles, stories, poems and novels, and plays. He has written an ebook in verse “Jack Daw and the Cat”; a novel about cricket entitled “Guile and Spin”: and with Rosie Larner, as Rosy Stewart, the novel “Hope: Stories from a Women’s Refuge”. He wrote the illustrated sonnet sequence “The Car” in 2016. He won the British Psychological Society’s Poetry Competition 2021. For more poetry and stories, see his blog. https://stuartlarner.blogspot.com/p/stuff-you-can-access-now.html