Cardboard Surfboards

There was a field by my old house; we called it the green,

There were 3 large hills and for any child it was a picture perfect scene,

The days I remember the most was when we played hide and seek,

Sam and me ran straight for the Green and I spotted something I never expected to see,

There were blue berry bushes everywhere, enough to fill our sweaters 10 times over,

Mums face when she saw the state of my clothes but that still didn’t stop us,

And I remember the day Simone’s mom was moving out and let us play with some left over boxes,

We tore the cardboard into surfboards, picked the biggest hill on the green and ran straight for the top of it,

It had rained the night before, so this was gonna be messy,

“It will make sliding down that much easier though” was how Sam convinced me into it,

I balanced my cardboard surfboard on the edge and refused to look down,

What’s the worst that could happen? Mom can’t ship me to India now,

And so I skied the hills length on a sheet of flimsy card,

It was stupid, reckless even, but I had never laughed so hard.

As my screams shifted to joy I thought, nothing could beat this.

The green was everything to us; I dunno what we’d do without it.

The new playground was cool, but the green would always remain the best.

Could have skied the hills until the sun began to set.

A few years later I learnt to ride my bike on the very same grass,

The green was the only place I felt safe because the fields stopped me rolling too fast,

And not long later, I started my first dance academy,

Tap, ballet, jazz and gymnastics,

And Sam was trying to teach me all the moves, though she secretly didn’t have a clue,

She claimed to be an ex-gymnastics champion at 10 you see, that’s how she knew everything I was about to do,

And we would have cartwheeled on the green all day, but mum soon called me in,

She laid dinner on the table and just as I was about to tuck in…

“They’re taking the green down you know” she mumbled and watched my smile fall,

They were taking down our hills, our blue berry bushes and fields; they were taking it all,

The night before work was due to start, mum let us stay out extra late,

Looked like every kid in the area had the same idea, they were all over the place.

We all lay on memorable spots on the green, looking up at the stars appreciating every moment of this,

Sharing stories about our adventures and regretting the many other things we could have done,

Feeling sunrise creep closer and closer, knowing that in a few days this would all be gone.

To everyone else it was just a bit of Green, for every child in that district of Selly Oak it was everything.

And now stands a development of new state of the art houses,

They’re beautiful, but nothing compared to what was torn down in the early 2000s

Went to visit it the other day, saw they took down our favourite tree,

We carved our names in the trunk. Guess there’s nothing left of little Sam and little me.