Marco Di Caprio

How easy once it was to just be free,
to sing sweet melodies and never stray,
to question all the harmony we’d see,
and hold creation’s beauty every day.

At sixteen, I would listen without end
to Strawberry Fields, and weep with quiet joy,
a feeling melancholic, yet transcending grief,
the perfect balance for a boy.

To see opposing forces touch and merge,
to feel the joyful and the sorrowful
become one breath, one single tender surge.
That was adolescence, beautiful. Now all of that has faded into gray:
the purity, the beauty, and the songs,
the laughter of my friends along the way,
the dirt paths where a child’s dreaming belongs.

The scent of my first love, those summers burned
in strawberry light through color, scent and sound,
young loves, so temporary, yet they earned
a kind of eternity on that ground.

Now when those memories return to me
they stream like water through my open hands
until they break, note by note, tenderly,
into an arpeggio no other can hear.