Childhood Presumptions

I have no illusions now.

I had fewer than they even in the beginning,

Aged by curse-magic and moonlight suffering,

But once I indulged in the small, comforting

Untruths of childhood, insofar as I could stifle

The all-too-practical voice that whispered,

In a dry, grating rasp, that I could not believe them.

They taught me to be young.

Sirius and James—perpetual, arrogant fire,

Blazing mischief and vitality, trying,

In spite of my dampened receptivity,

To ignite these in me with their own spark.

They believed they were invincible,

Ageless, incarnate demigods;

"We'll live forever"—and they made me

Want to believe it, watching them;

It was incomprehensible

That such energy and passion could die.

In time I learnt to play into their games—

Assume just one more face, the one

That should have

(Would have)

Been mine, unscarred and whole,

Closing one pale hand around the vestiges

Of what had been stolen away.

I pretended to be what I was not—

Naïve and invulnerable

(human),

and in time, I came to believe

That we had captured something eternal.

Now I realize that we were nothing so special,

Just clever, and with some small measure of talent and luck,

Drunk on the honeyed mead of our own possibility.

I am the last one standing, a tree with deep roots

That has learnt to bend. James and Sirius—

Brighter and more glorious by far than I—

Have been lost to the unforgiving, inexorable advance

Of war, shimmering gold through the narrow neck

Of an unseen hourglass.

For all their assumptions of invincibility,

Power over death was beyond their reach;

Their assumptions of safety were only that, illusionary

And fleeting, the constructs of a mind searching for stones

To wall out disaster.

But Treachery reached a skeletal hand

Through a crack between the stones

(Just a small fault, no more, but enough—

And past enough—to be fatal),

Smothering their radiance in an icy fist.

Now I am glad that I am, at heart, adult,

Neverland immortality long since proven false and fleeting.

Admission of vulnerability, human flaw, permits me live.

I make no presumptions of longevity—

I am no leaping fire, but a single candle lighted at both ends

And dwindling. There is some comfort, though, in knowing

That I will not die for being fooled

By mental smoke and mirrors.