Name: Prodigal
Duration: P00H02M03S
Description: For Nessa O'Mahony.

Prodigal

from Reading The Light by Ross Thompson

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For Nessa O'Mahony.

lyrics

Remember when the races came your way.
They ruled out elliptic tracks and shipped in
a rig of lights, cameras and presenters
in corduroy blazers who cared not one fig

for a minor heat in a hidebound town.
Not even a barefoot Zola Budd piqued
their interest as they broadcast the relays,
sprints and hurdles. But the crowds came in droves,

filling out the park, spilling up steep, lush
banks on tartan picnic rugs, riding clouds
of daisies and dandelions, and guzzling
Tayto cheese and onion with torpedo

flasks of Campbell’s condensed tomato soup.
You bored, and toddled off into the thick
of an undulating throng of giants
dressed in nylon tanktops and Crimplene slacks.

The announcer’s voice boomed like canned thunder
while you spied on two lovers flattening
the grass beneath the quivering branches
of a horse chestnut tree, and then bothered

a curled up hedgehog. You grew bored again,
and returned to where you thought was the spot
where your family should be but could not
see past a tapestry of bellies, knees

and elbows sweeping side to side. A tide
of panic, growing frantic, surged inside
your ears as cheer after cheer swept over
the verge of where you stood, twenty years

and two thousand miles from where you set out.
It took all of your strength to fight your way
back to your family, who were too lost
in the races to notice you were gone.