Lost Children

When my father talked of his sister, not my aunt,
I knew that time had shifted. I was now an interim:
another child reclaimed the years that went;
the child he failed to leave behind - in memoriam
of Eden's endless easy light; Elysium
before, not after, life's bitter coliseum.
Dare we admit this favourite? Golden girls
will come and go and take their tender gifts,
to leave us lastly harping back to firsts,
before the weddings, cots, the seals and rifts.
Aging to boyhood, we seek the river's reverence:
a dance of gnats, lost glints of rippled gold,
a home beneath the trailing sky's beneficence;
we youngsters leave our children growing old.