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RISK
ADDICTS
The
tumbling, acrobatic child
is
keen to try he knows not what
peregrinations
on the lawn,
oneiric
leapings in his cot.
She
holds him in her arms aloft:
he
wriggles every way to get
a
new experience, and takes
for
granted there’s a safety net.
He
sits for minutes and then dares
a
backward lurch without a thought
that
safe arms might just not be there
in
which he has been always caught.
When
growing up he’ll have to learn
he
cannot always have his fling
into
the new or seen untried
in
some fast car or circus ring;
he
can’t stay out to spite a wife
or
put what he has built at risk
without
a thought for who gets hurt
(could
be himself) when he is brisk.
Yet
while the ukuleles play,
while
clowns round him do somersaults,
he
will insist on hit or miss
and
to the Devil with his faults!
For
what’s the point in playing safe
when
an admired toxophilite
believes
his arrows go round bends
and
can hit targets out of sight?
The
genius and egotist-
adventurer
won’t play it mild.
Someone
must break their pratfalls as
a
mother blocks her falling child.
Alan
Marshfield
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