Pamplemousse

The Student Literary Journal of Vermont State University

As a Small Child, He Was

Poetry

Bedouin of the morning,
player in the river of his dreams
that played him back
in a steady stream.

Grown up, he spent his days
in magical incantation,
his nights in the shadows,
drinking his pain away

until the string
of his theory
that he was forever
ascending into the clouds
snapped.

EILEEN HENNESSEY’s poems and short stories have been published in numerous literary journals. Her two book-length collections of poems are This Country of Gale-force Winds, published by NYQ Books in 2011, and Places Where We Have Lived Forever, published by Off The Park Press in 2015. She is a translator of legal and commercial documentation and books on art history into English from several other West European languages, and teaches in the translation studies program at New York University.