The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Ray Greenblatt serve as the inaugural Mad Poet of the Year for 2021.
CHILDHOOD GAMES
by Ray Greenblatt
I
At the birthday party
Find-the-penny is
an enthralling game
like feasting eyes
on an open treasure chest,
it seems so easy.
A shiny penny at the foot of a chair,
a penny at the base of a wall,
one cuddled in the moss,
one sitting baldly on a flagstone
like a golden frog on a lily pad.
You see no one else, so intent,
tiny blazing suns
in a universe of lawn,
among the ivy
between tree roots.
In these scourings you even turn up
a dull cent you know was not placed there
to be found and flick it away.
A penny by a napkin on the picnic table
so obvious you might miss it
so ripe to be picked,
did a grown up leave it by mistake.
Easy riches
fists glutted
oozing copper effulgence
which you might never have again,
but to your advantage
you don’t know it yet.
II
To play Follow-the-string
you must pull on the rein
but there must be a snag
on this telephone wire,
this filament which spins out
of a transparent spider,
with a surprise at the very end.
Through the bars of the banister
around a paneled room in the gloom
a table top gleaming has dusty feet,
lean when going parallel
to someone else’s path,
learn the etiquette of pausing
when faced with an oncoming body.
Knee-high like a fence wire
you don’t know how long it is
winding its way through zones of light.
Until a shape with hue and weight
appears in the distance
growing nearer, larger,
as if dangling mid-air
wrapped in pale tissue
of blue or pink or yellow
delicate as a duckling.
But once undone you realize
what was most important—
to follow the trail
evade the traps
gain whatever the prize.
In our suburban neighborhood, one family threw fancy birthday parties with lavish food and drink for their child. It must have taken many hours to plan and prepare games for invited children to play. The games outside and inside were detailed and challenging. It wasn’t until years later that I realized these games could symbolize aspects of adult life.
Ray Greenblatt has been a poet for forty years and an English teacher longer than that. He was an editor of General Eclectic, a board member of the Philadelphia Writers Conference, and is presently on the staff of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. He has won the Full Moon Poetry Contest, the Mad Poets Annual Contest, and twice won the Anthony Byrne Annual Contest for Irish Poetry sponsored by The Irish Edition. His poetry has been translated into Gaelic, Polish, Greek and Japanese.