Someday
By John Herlihy

I
The infant baby was tucked in its mother’s arms,
Smiling wildly into her eyes and sucking its palms.
With its eyes, the baby asked when it would be free,
Free to walk on its own two feet, all the world to see.
There will be time enough all the world to discover,
Time enough all the mysteries of your life to uncover.
Someday, the mother knowingly replied with her eyes,
With love and longing, imagining her infant full-size.

II
No longer a baby, let’s remember something that’s true ;
Through the gate of yesterday, a memory begins to brew.
I see a white winter haven with snowflakes falling to the ground;
I am ten years old and find myself shoveling snow all around.
Beyond the door, the snow was sparkling, clean and cold,
With iced lashes, I threw snowballs at my mother, feeling bold.
Someday, you will remember with shame, she began to scold;
Today is that someday and I have only the memory to hold.

III
I surveyed my mind to enter yet another darkened room,
That desperately needed to be swept clean with a broom.
Cluttered with another memory filled with cobwebs and dust,
A mind that in another time was full of wanton desire and lust.
I lived through my 20s without having an identity of my own;
How then could I find love, if no love of self was home grown?
Someday, my mother said, you will find love that will survive,
Now I know my mother wished to keep my hope of love alive.

IV
The day finally arrived that I always held far away as someday,
A someday that arrives when the price for living we must pay.
My mother’s mind began quietly to shut down and drift away,
It was difficult to watch her take leave; I just wanted her to stay.
“When I dream of you,” she said, “you are still playing as a child.
In my mind,” she went on, “you were always innocent and wild.”
That someday arrived when she could no longer call me by name
To this day, I still wish life had no such someday, full of blame.

V
I ventured forth into the world waiting for future somedays to arrive,
I aspired to be a writer and with that in mind hoped to thrive.
The days followed one after the other to become months and years,
A thousand months that turned seemingly into a thousand years.
The words poured forth out of the boyhood of my bursting heart,
I wrote of sentiments and emotions from which I could never part.
The words now lie mysteriously hopeful, in silence on the printed page
Whether anyone should ever read them is impossible for me to gage.

VI
My mother never told me of a someday that would never come,
Someday always lies there in the distance, on this side of the sun.