Joseph Capista: “Lost Children”

LOST CHILDREN

Coney Island, June 9, 1941

In Weegee’s photograph we see the boy

Unmothered underneath the boardwalk sign,

But it’s the man, his smile, on whom we fix

Our gaze, white shirt, white belt, white captain’s hat:

Our eye holds him a beat, then wanders toward

The littoral awash with roustabouts

And idlers, women half-undressed who laugh

A little loud because lost’s almost found.

But what about the boy who clings against

And to the man, child eyes forever closed?

Our object’s subject blurs. We look from boy

To man to boy before it clicks: We’re him.

Words focused, too, prove accurate, untrue:

By we it’s I we mean; by him it’s them.

Joseph Capista has a poetry collection, Intrusive Beauty, that recently won the Hollis Summers Prize and will be published by Ohio University Press in 2019.  AGNI, Ploughshares, Hudson Review, and Georgia Review have published his poems.  Capista teaches writing at Towson University.