Three Childhoods

  On whose account, then, of these hundreds
  Ashrill in this playground of anguish,
  Under the yellowish, suburb-smothering noon,
  Of these hundreds at sixes and sevens at ten and eleven,

  Should Heaven be loudest appealed to?

  Luke Salt’s, for example?  Wild-hearted and gleeful of limb,
  Eager to get stuck in
  To some challenge in which to triumph
  And bring out the best in his allies and rivals alike,
  But a boisterous-elbowed boy,
  Blind to his own wayward roughness, so can’t think why
  Teachers all pick on him.
  And what he might do without meaning, though done on purpose,
  Others do back, so he does back back —
  To be punished with shunning and shame.
  And trouble at home he carries in secret to school
  In goblets of anger that always, eventually, spill
  Awfully over, costing him comrades,
  Marring his soul with a dark and deepening stain,
  And laying to waste the Luke Salt who might yet be,
  But whom, if lost, shall we ever regain?

  Or Connie-May Bushell, alight
  With gregarious giggles, and bright with wit,
  A brilliant play-mate aflash with ideas,
  Lively and bookish, but apt to be led astray,
  Whose innocence, if undefended,
  Will soon be ended?
  For what will prevent her, some day not far hence,
  Seeing the world’s ways,
  From trashing her own constitution
  And wholly dismantling her soul,
  Abolishing all the old ways with all her might,
  Shuttering, barring, veiling,
  Uprooting and ridding her whole
  Self of her former self?
  The passionate games will die,
  Sullenness cloud her eye,
  The voice that should sweeten will harden,
  And only a shadow will loiter
  Where light should have lightened the lives of all around.

  Or perhaps Peter Palmer,
  Standing out under the branches still,
  Imagining friendship under the dust-brown leaves,
  Friendship and conversation;
  Given to sniffiness, true, towards most of the rest,
  Vexed by their posturings, irked by their noise
  (The bossy and fussy girls and the mindless boys) —
  But heart set firm on a distant bearing:
  Transcendent good, and to do what is just
  Will endure what he must.

  O Lord, save thy people, and bless thine heritage.
  Govern them, and lift them up for ever.
  O Lord, in thee have they trusted.
  Let them never be confounded.