Go Back, Old Boy by Arnold Molina Azurin

Go Back, Old Boy
By Arnold Molina Azurin

Go back to your father’s town
Go, as an old boy
With whole eyes
And bus windows ever fully open
For tons of wind and light,
With no alien vision glazing
Your once awed, startled eyes
But a child’s clear lust for those
Familiar dust-trails; tall tamarind
Tree shaking its full-grown leaves;
That slow-slinking river that glints
With blazing blades of the spitfire sun,
That sudden shriek! you know too well
Comes from the blue-winged kingfisher
Pecking, feasting on its wriggling prey.

Or, go as a young man,
With world-sprouted senses
Cast in glossy tempered steel;
Reckon then the grating years
Reckon the mangled mothwings since
The old house was outgrown
Like an emptied bird’s nest
Of straw now dangling from a twig,
Since prodigals took
To the tempting twisting maze of roads
With tense eyes on the roadsigns
(Earlier, the wrecked stars
Could never be restored.)
Go back to your father’s town
Go, as an old boy.