One-hundred and forty-four light bulbs, all off,
Twelve rows by twelve bulbs of dim dreams,
Where have the children gone with their songs?
The scarecrow stands outside with its hay intact;
Where have the thoughts of better times gone?
I see only crows in the tears of lonely youth;
When will the butterflies break free of their cocoons?
Withered daisies fail to slip through the ground’s cracks,
The Sunday boys only imagine dark a dreary cloud;
Where are all the love letters written by dim lighting,
Keeping secret from anyone but the reader themselves?
The name anonymous no longer holds truth and romance.
Only the old man tends to the tomatoes in the garden,
And the children hide from their darks skies in the indoors.
But you and I, the between, not so much the child,
Yet so quite far we come from being the gardeners,
We are the last of the sunflower seeds let free
Through the singing airs that flicker candles at night
As they whisper limericks and ballads of dramatics
While the flame seals the ink in its skinned messenger.
Hill side dandelions and chuckling cardinals are ours alone,
No greater sense of innocence came to them with new ideas.
We were the last to take our bats to the scarecrow
When we took the shortcut home through the corn fields.
And the light bulbs, twelve by twelve, on-hundred and forty-four,
They are ours alone to light, with our own warm dreams,
With our sunshine pasts and moonlight futures of hillsides,
Picking wild flowers of violet, chasing birds of red and blue,
Painting our knees in green, rolling through the tall grass,
The bubbles of globes with rippling rainbows are ours,
Ours alone, all the worlds of bright colors and light bulbs;
They are ours to light, you and I, we will light the world.