Innocence

If I could be innocent for a day,
not engage in life's bitter fray,
watch as clouds flitter by by day,
listening to that creaking swing of yesterday.

I wonder where the mists of dawn have gone,
I wonder why time for me has torn,
all memory of fond remembrance aborne
on clouds that soft breezes with me have borne.

How nostalgic when I think of the time,
when actions were not determined by dollar and dime,
when life was more than playing a deceptive mime,
when we were not all covered with reality's pragmatic grime.

To return to the time of unknowing kindness,
when self was not served by practicing wickedness,
to know that love for love's sake was not willful blindness,
to not feel that being loved was a state of perpetual presumptiousness.