Send me back to the Country that I Came From

Send me back to the country that I came from, please.
Where we children attached baseball cards to the spokes of our bikes
and raced down the street flippity flippity flippity, faster and faster,
pretending we were on motorcycles.

Send me back to the country that I came from,
where we laid under the stars until the fire-house whistle blew,
sounding like a distant foghorn, then raced home with a last burst of energy in the strange joy
of running through the dark with friends.

Send me back, oh yes, send me back,
to the river running brown and wide between the levees,
to lying on my stomach in the grass and reading Bradbury for the first time
on a summer day, to running through the woods like "wild Indians,"
playing Scrabble on the front porch,
walking the tracks for miles.

Punch my ticket, stamp my passport,
put me on the Greyhound that goes back to that lost valley
and that no longer attainable town.
                                                        You fall asleep on the bus,
certain that by morning you will awaken in the room
with the Willie Mays poster on the wall,
your bike outside in the grass where you left it,
your mother calling you downstairs for bacon and eggs.

Reaching the border at exactly midnight,
a sleepy guard chats with the driver. Both of them laugh,
as if a joke has been played. You hear one of them say, a touch of winter in the air,
and the other one say, same as it ever was.