1953 Danville Illinois
One summer at Lake Vermilion Beach
a boy went missing. He was the younger
brother of a teen aged girl who worked
the candy counter at my father’s theatre—
one that smiled at me so that I shook
one that smiled at me so that I shook
on the insides. The lifeguard had us all
join hands in the shallow water and walk
out toward the horizon. When I was
chest deep, my foot stepped on something
foreign, and I called out to the lifeguard
who was three links down from me. He
did a surface dive and pushed the boy up
so that his blue body floated face up
in front of me, a corpse, a lost boy.
1946 Cerro Gordo, Illinois
My cousins and I were playing hide-and-seek
in the expanse of cornfields when the supper
bell rang. Even after olly-olly-oxen-free was
called several times, little David was missing.
Quickly my mother and father, my aunt and uncle,
and a scattering of neighbors who had been called
gathered. We formed a line, three rows of corn each,
and began to walk deeper and deeper into the fields
calling his name. After about two hours, as dusk
was approaching, his mother found him surrendered,
stretched out asleep between two rows of tall, dusty,
tasseled corn. She stammered between anger and relief,
lifted him up into her arms as his sleepy eyes opened,
and said, Oh David, my little lost boy, we found you.
Septuagenarian Gary Blankenburg is a retired English teacher whose doctoral dissertation
treated the “confessional” poets. Blankenburg is the author of eight books of poetry and
fiction and was a founding editor of The Maryland Poetry Review and Electric Press.
His new manuscript, The Times Theatre, depicts the spiritual angst of an aging persona.
Nowadays he reads Victorian novels and paints while gathering himself up for eternity.