Poetry Bus: Alley Adventure

This week's Poetry Bus has the famous Uiscebot as our daring driver. He wants us to go somewhere different and write about it. For some reason, a memory of one of the many adventures my brother and I shared as children came to mind. Stephen always discovered fascinating places, and I was the only sister who had the guts (or insanity) to go with him. This one's at our grandparents' house in an old section of Detroit, Michigan where each neighborhood had an alley.  Enjoy!

My grandparents' old house in Detroit, completely remodeled. 
You can see the tree in the background. Beyond that tree is the alley.

Alley Adventure

The Alley behind our grandparents' house
was intriguing to my brother and me.

The grown-ups didn’t want us to go there,

but he knew how to unlatch the back gate,

Sshhh…very quietly, so it wouldn’t squeak.

We tiptoed onto the graveled road.

A sweet yet acrid smell filled the air;

it was a strange, forbidden world.

This day, we discovered a horseshoe print,

embedded in a piece of hidden pavement,

shadowed by the tall grasses growing wild,

fighting for a piece of the dappled sunrays

that played upon the broken cement.

“Only one print,” Stephen whispered,

“Must be from Pegasus.”

Voices formed words in an unknown tongue

and floated from a large window of an old house

behind an unpainted wooden fence,

“Sssshhh!  Ghosts!” he  whispered.

I bent down to pick up a weapon,

a broken shard of brown glass

“This is a piece of magic glass, Jeanne,

from a land faraway… Put it down!

We don’t know what evil powers it might have.”

Reluctantly, I tossed the shard.

No magic today… no spilling of blood.

A quick run to the old wooden gate,

and we were back on Grandma’s garden path,

with freshly cut grass, wildflowers and roses,

our absence unnoticed, our memories enriched.

Jeanne I. Lakatos  2011