The stationer boy
In the shadow of a murky building, in a street with an ugly appearance
and an unpleasant smell, without sun and without human warmth
for most of the day, a boy and a dog tend after their only
legal craft assigned to them by the world: survival.
The boy and the dog are not just one body and one soul,
but they are also, as the world believes, one voice.
This voice, which seems to be heard only on Christmas Eve,
comes from a shrill ghost which lies restless in its grave;
in that sad street, which never housed a single butterfly
in its whole existence, there was some kind of greedy
spider, that spun its web to prey on careless people.
Yet, the boy and the dog await each new day with humble
and reverent obedience, and they sell paper: regular, fine
concept, white, whitish-brown, golden-blue; stamps,
sprinkling sand, nails, pencils, red and green ribbons
for gift wrapping; old notebooks, calendars,
diaries. To cut a long story short, the boy and his dog
trade in good old values. They are invisible to the courts,
because, after all, who cares for the poor, as the wise would say.
This morning, however, the boy and his dog were not in their
usual place, the golden sundust floated on the soft, sweet back
of the wind, as if looking for the stationer boy and his dog.
And the boy was lamenting the death of his old dog, in the shadow,
as usual, far away from the eyes of the world, and these salty, silent
tears were looking for at least one short gaze of the world,
but the cold world considers the boy to be just a regular, modest,
humble, honorable, and thus invisible stationer.
He kneels next to his only friend, and with a broken voice
he bids him farewell for one last time:
“Good night, my only friend! Good night, my little
stationer! Sweet and blissful dreams!”
And so the stationer boy was once again left alone in that sad street.
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Submitted on November 10, 2016
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:42 min read
- 1 View
Quick analysis:
Scheme | X X A B X C X X X A B B X X X X D X X X X D X X X X X C X B X X |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic heptameter |
Characters | 1,823 |
Words | 342 |
Stanzas | 32 |
Stanza Lengths | 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 |
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"The stationer boy" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Mar. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/87989/the-stationer-boy>.
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