Only Poem by Albert Ahearn

A knotted Tarzan rope dangles
From the same sycamore tree limb
When I was a young, snot-nosed,
devil-may-care adolescent.
Nothing has really changed that much
Since my time: the same swimming hole,
Probably the same railroad spikes
That I hammered into the trunk
That we used as rungs to scale it.
But it’s a very lonely place
today. All my childhood buddies
Are either dead or too infirmed
To care; so here I stand alone
Willing, but no one to play with.