Other people’s trash
When you’re a boy, trash is treasure. I remember walking to school one day with my best friend — when was it? third grade, maybe? — and we saw a smashed plastic ship model lying on the curb beside some empty trash cans. There were planks and spars and tangles of rigging and, to our great delight, a double-handful of tiny cannons.
We gathered up what we could and hurried on to school with our booty. Over the next couple days, we combed the grass for any further bits of ship debris as we passed by until a lawnmower told us more decisively than words that we would find no more pieces.
I still have one of those cannons — the sole surviving relic of a distant memory and a valued piece of flotsam from the lost world of boyhood.
sea spray
and the sting
of blowing sand . . .
even a broken clock
can’t stop the tick of time
Published in Atlas Poetica: A Journal of World Tanka (Issue 22), 8/26/15.
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Bill Waters ~~ Haiku 
Excellent, Bill! The poem summed up the experience artfully and perfectly.
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