To the boy

For Mattie J.T. Stepanek

I’ve been scouring the internet for days, weeks, looking for you. 

Scrambling to find an action-shot of your lively being alive activity.

Boy with attrition opals of blue and full glassed view of life.

Little man I’d probably call you if you stood before me, and told me why my life mattered;

Young philosopher sitting upon the rubble of what seems to be distant memory now,

Of two towers fallen in the Downtown of all our wildest dreams and most terrifying nightmares.

But despite it all, you saw treasured pebbles to decorate our earth with, instead of stones to throw in fear.

To the boy, 

I am here, and I am silent.

I am listening for you to guide me 

With your heart-song lullaby.

To the boy, I do not know you,

But I feel you went to heaven for our generation

So we could live our lives in your name.

I hear the click of a 1990s camera, and methodical pasting of a polaroid buzz;

You have printed our world better than expected

And I should not shake the photo but like anyone else,

I want to touch the future with the colours of the past.

To the boy.

To our boy.

To you boy.

To you young son of something better,

Who trained lions and lambs to lie in pasture.

You parable weaver, You peace seeker,

You unapologetic dreamer,

That in so many ways was not boyish,

But spritely, 

You showed fight and might in the face of the everyday.

And I want to live out a thousand childhoods with you 

As I sit on the cusp of double your age.

Where did the time go between us?

How did we just miss each other as we crawled around this earth?

I’m sorry to the boy

Who didn’t get to see a family like he dreamed,

To make it well into your teens,

But I promise that I can see something bigger for you,

And this is my heart-song for you 

So shall close my eyes   

Join my hands in prayer to the skies,    

And hope to see you 

Standing at the epicentre of the world,

Holding us all in peaceful embrace.