Where Are the Toys of Yesteryear?

Brueghel, detail from "Children's Games"

Brueghel, detail from “Children’s Games”

Between my father’s declining mental condition, the loss of a good friend (Beth Reynolds, the mother of my colleague Kate Chandler), the horrific bombing in Boston, and the hectic end of the semester, I’m feeling emotionally wrung out. To cheer myself up, I went thumbing through some of my father’s unpublished poems and found this one, written for the family’s 1997 Christmas card.

As you will see, my father was old-fashioned when it came to toys. Of course, he got me and my brothers to fall in love with the most splendid toy of them all, which is books. Echoing François Villon’s famous “Ballad of the Ladies of Times Past” (with its haunting refrain, “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”), this poem has me reminiscing about the games we used to play with my father. As perhaps you have picked up from the light verse of his that I have regularly published, he has always had a child’s imagination. I sense the influence of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses in this poem:

Ballad of the Games of Yesteryear

By Scott Bates

Oh, tell me where, in what fair lands
Lie all the games we used to play,
The gliders launched with rubber bands,
Trucks, trains, and marbles, kites, croquet,
Diabolo and bilboquet,
Kick the Can and Ducks and Deer;
Where are the toys of yesterday?
Where are the games of yesteryear?

The stockings stuffed with jelly beans
We used to open starry-eyed
Now swell with murderous machines
Designed for kiddy fratricide;
Malevolent monsters lurk inside
The packages of Christmas cheer
Angrily waiting to get untied . . .
Where are the games of yesteryear?

Computer wars are grimly in
And guts and gore are all the go,
Death Stars invade the Planet Minh,
And cosmic killers run the show;
“As Barbie’s kissing G.I. Joe,
Six slimy aliens appear…”
(Which costs, of course, a lot of dough)–
Where are the games of yesteryear?

ENVOI

Consumer Parent, spare thy purse,
Waste not thy wealth on guns and gear;
Go buy a book—you could do worse—
And dream of games of yesteryear.

My parents have been among the most faithful readers of this blog, and I’ve always liked to surprise my father by publishing his poems. The fact that he will not be reading this one tears me apart.

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