Was just following up Stuart, a blogger who had enjoyed ‘my mother’s molecules’, a poem I shared here recently.

I am prompted by his website, which celebrates his love affair with Lego, to release a tender poem by my reclusive student Pan Piper, with her permission.

‘Lament at the end of Lego’ describes her reassuring her young son that there would be other activities that he would enjoy when he grew up, and also transmits some of her own pain at his leaving home.

lament at the end of Lego

His father was away, earning our tea.
'What will there be', he wept, 'when there
is no more Lego?' ('When I've swept
the blocks of childhood under bed',
I nearly said.)   Lego in Danish means this: 'play
well' and in a way that's what he feared:
when beard or stubble overtook,
'What book to entertain?' when rainy tears 
strummed down upon the cheek of dusk.

Like musk the girls of puberty emerged; 
I urged him thus to trust what would befall
(and did). They bade us hold those bricks for longer
while they (now wed) earned stronger, and
spurned our need to shed. 

			We kept them safe instead, 
those little yellow faces, trouser braces, ghoul 
called 'Ghostol', and blocks of ABS*. And so
that Lego, yes, stayed  'neath his bed, in cupboards 
that - as teen - he and his father made, and I 
kept clean. 	

		              And rather it was I (blurting
that I was hurting) who left the scene.

© Pan Piper   4 November 2021   			*Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS)