A POEM FOR MIKEY: A GAME OF PONTOONS

 A Poem for Mikey, Grandchild #6,

Michael Albert O. Casuga, in red shirt, shy and reserved, stares at something while older brother, Matthew Francis eggs on his Dad, Albert Beau Casuga, with a banshee the pater did not react to kindly. (Eyes closed, or was that a grimace, Beau?)



A GAME OF PONTOONS

(For Mikey, Grandchild #6)


Mikey (Michael Albert Casuga who turned 13 last May 7) bested his cousins in the game of balancing on the lily pads (mock pontoons) while crossing the pool without falling into the water before he gets to the last pontoon. This ancient mariner, bedazzled by his grandchildren’s confidence and derring-do, failed to even get past the first pontoon despite their egging him on: Come on, ‘lolo! You can do it! Just do it! --- Writer's Notebook on a Family Break at Great Wolf Lodge, Niagara

He leap-frogged lithely with tentative grace
from one drifting lily pad to the other,
an uncertain smile creased on his elfin face:
quite like relishing the exquisite danger
of leaping from one life moment to another
shorn of anxiety or fear a fall could end it all.

Would the pontoons hold
while he teeters on them
grasping for absent branches?

His final leap was also this old heart’s leap
of faith that this lad’s leap-frogging
will end in a crash of pool where ripples
are his balm and sinking is his baptism
of fire in a game called living where bridges
crumble with the tottering pontoons.


---ALBERT B. CASUGA

My only son, Albert Beau, (extreme left) with his wife, Sophia Ocampo-Casuga, a registered nurse at the Credit Valley Hospital in Mississauga, and their children: (L-R) Michael Albert, 13, Megan Sarah, 15, and Matthew Francis (with glasses), 17, Grandkids #6, 5, 3 respectively.