Two Boys, At Play

While we ate amazing pork dishes cooked a hundred different ways and drank dark rich wine, while the string of light bulbs burned overhead and the black river drifted by behind us, while we sang happy birthdays and percolated in the Fall night atmosphere of friendship, I couldn't help but watch two little boys come and go, playing together, oblivious of the world and of the stewardship that was their's to hold safe, as we all held it so dearly that night around that table. 

While the succulent skins of choice-swollen sows roast in an electric fire

peppered by the refined spices of a colored history of Cajun culinary composition,

While aromatic pig flesh flowed freely from the beast’s bits lying in creative combinations cut for our disposal,

Our greased fingers plucking toothpicks of meat from well-placed plates,

Salacious lips missing slick strips of tender hog muscle to fall glistening buried in beards,

Those same glazed lips over which spill the pungent pig-sweet breath of young conversation,

While laughter danced between intermittent songs of philosophy and enterprise,

While the golden brown Abita ale of ideas mixed in the malt froth foam of the passions of people in love with each other,

And hand-held lightening became a birthday candle that leapt willy-nilly between pale cumulus clouds of body and bone,

The thunder that cracked was the cackling zest of life,

While the mud-rich river that once carried wayward Creoles tip-toed by in the maddening darkness,

While the grass grew heavy under the sins of a cooling night,

While the lamps burned ever on to light the way,

While the root beer settled,

And the cinder blocks remained wrapped,

Two boys came and went,

The venerable youth of this great southern city,

Caretakers of its culture,

Back and forth they ran,

Keeping to themselves the sly secrets only boys can keep,

Two boys, at play.

11.2012