Forgetting how to ride a bike

 

My father loved the stars

In another life,

permitted education,

his facility with numbers

might have made him

a famous astronomer

instead of an accountant

See that bright one?

That’s Beetle-juice

I remember him telling

Yes, I’d say meekly

wishing to please

But I couldn’t of course

It was all just fuzzy blobs

 

See that milkbar on the corner?

No I said. Didn’t want to be sent

somewhere I couldn’t see

Stupid child! they thought

It never occurred to them

that I really couldn’t see.

 

So on my seventh birthday

a bicycle purple painted,

with Virginia

in gold down the crossbar

the most beautiful bike ever seen

I was terrified

to ride it, I couldn’t see

where I was going,

what was in front

I walked it to school

to Brownies after school

to have it admired,

to show it off

but I couldn’t actually ride it.

 

Six months later

my myopia finally spotted by a teacher

I learned to ride with my new glasses

I was never very good

never enthusiastic

never worthy of the bike’s beauty

The skill now long forgotten

Virginia Lowe

Virginia said: I was myopic (short sighted) from birth, but no one realised until a teacher called my parents when I was seven. I didn’t know of course – that’s just how the world was – it didn’t occur to me that it might look different to different people.  After I got glasses I was fine – but never really confident riding a bike, however beautiful the bike was. Now I’m old. When they removed the cataracts from my eyes, they fixed the myopia as well, so no more glasses! There are some things I miss though, especially the pattern of circles of light through a dense leaf canopy. But now I can see the birds instead. I’ll never go back to bike riding though.

I first wrote this poem in response to a prompt on another poetry site, Silver Birch Press. The prompt was ‘learning to ride a bike’. It will fit into my autobiography in verse (not yet published) A Myopic’s Vision.