• Author: O'Keefe, John
• Editor: B-7413
• Newspaper: The Umpire volume 5
• Page Number:
• Date: 12 20 1916
• Tags:
• poetry

THE TOYS I USED TO KNOW By JOHN O’KEEFE

Within the shopping center here I stand a waif and stray, And watch the throngs of women dear Who pay and pay and pay. Wide-eyed, I look about, but oh! Where are the toys I used to know?

Swift an aeroboat goes by, To boyhood’s marveling, And fascinated eyes rove high To watch the wonder thing. But, heart of mine! across my sight There floats a little home-made kite.

My boy demands a ’lectric train, With fifty feet of track. His modern spirit skims the plain And brooks no holding back. O Christmas when I used to bless My key-wound fifty-cent express!

My little girl I must amuse, And so I buy at view A doll that wears French high-heeled shoes And silken stockings, too! Yet lo! a vision from above— My sister’s doll, of rags and love!

O dear, dead days that brought to me My earliest burst of speed, When Santa placed beneath the tree My first velocipede! Yet my son tells the Christmas czar He’s got to have a motorcar.

O tree, long since decayed and dead, What joys you held apart! Gee! how those mittens, thick and red, Warmed both my hands and heart! But now my wife I have to buy A pair of auto gauntlets high.

Here, where the incandescents gleam Amid the costly show, I seem to see, as in a dream, The penny candies glow. Tree of my youth! my heart, grown new, Again hangs on a branch of you!