PRE NINTENDO

I travel back in time once more
by way of aroused memory
using that fantastical door
to revisit the childhood me.

To young woods on my uncle's farm
beside two track road which ran a ridge
on a bright fall day middling warm
barely in view of an old bridge.

There reclined an old sawdust pile
and a huge rusty old saw blade;
no house for nearly half a mile
a hundred yards to closest glade.

That sawdust pile became a fort
from which bad guys were often shot
(my stick gun fired without retort)
I spent endless hours at that spot.

The saw blade became a target
which rang with every rock I threw
sometimes almost until sunset
there where all the wild things grew.

All these times on my own playground
no thought to all of the hard work
Which had taken place there all around.
The sweat shed by men who didn't shirk.

But in distant hindsight I now see
uncle and cousins all toiling there
while that saw cut up what would be
the home which they would later share.

Perhaps I should not be held to blame
for how could any young child know
how his elders came to tame
the lands where their off spring would grow?