Thumper

Gloucester, England, 1943  

I’m ten years old 
watching Bambi slip and slide 
wide-eyed on the ice  
Thumper and his goofy laugh  
to the rescue  
a hundred raucous kids 
drowning out what he says  
as he unravels Bambi’s legs  
spins him laid out flat 
uses his own feet 
to skate on the ice 
       Bambi asks his mother  
       why they’ve fled to a clearing 
       his mother blunt and brutal 
       Man is in the forest         

       the hunter shoots her dead 
       Bambi’s father finds him  
as smoke of a campfire  
       spreads through the forest 
       and animals flee from its fury 
we cheer and howl our laughter 
as Thumper bangs one ear with his foot 
sending snow pouring out the other  
while on the street outside  
at school   in church   in the sweet shop  
everyone tells us  
       Luftwaffe is in the sky 

TONY HOWARTH

Tony Howarth, a playwright, director, and former journalist, retired in 1991 after twenty-eight years as a teacher of English and theatre at Woodlands High School in Westchester County, New York. He began writing poetry in 2009 after a visit to William Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage, in England’s Lake District. Much of his poetry focuses on the pleasures and perplexities of growing old.