Before anything else, remind yourself that children fold paper planes because they cannot fly.

Abstract

Childhood is a subject written about almost exclusively posthumously. That is, children often lack the reach and means to express themselves in formal academic settings and, perhaps because of this, go unappreciated. Their name is shamed; childish, juvenile, small. Their lives are ordered, controlled. But there is always something profoundly powerful about their existence, especially in poetry, because amongst the myriad experiences of humankind perhaps the only two which everyone shares are that they were once young, and will one day die.

This poem is a celebration of mundane things gone unappreciated, little victories and fond memories which find otherworldly prefix in where the extrapolation of their consequences lie. Each right justified line serves as a summarisation and reflection of the more jovial, whimsical quatrain set to the tune of one particular part of "Volunteer Fireman's Picnic", and together the right justified lines come together as a poem in their own right.