Story In Rhyme: Where Did All The Dragons Go?

• George Lu, Grade 12, James Ruse Agricultural High School -
• Short Story
• 2018

Excellence Award in the 'Write Along 2018' competition

When you were young and dreaming they said to you – take your head out of the clouds. But you didn’t care for all this and that. You were in a world of your own, proud. This world had dragons to be slain, mounted, chased and owned as pets; fire dragons, water dragons, earth and air, and more between the cabinets.

Dragons don’t exist they said, yet there they were, in the sky! Cloudy white in Viking lore or like red parrot flown by; it wasn’t only dinosaur-green that “experts” gave a dragon’s sheen, the library held all shapes and sizes to be pet or from a distance seen.

You spent hours colouring your thoughts with fiction, like a squire in-training for battle. Questing outside, dragons presented themselves, for you to tame and grapple. Full-bellied and proud, you burped fire, scared birds with your teeth, and ran. Too fast you fell only to display, your scaly skin – Dragon!

Like a knight charging towards his enemies you faced the world head on. You left each morning with farewells, and waited for the bell to sound. You were briefed with rules and with your band, stomped humourously around. You lived for the battle and campaign, directing squires to the Lost and Found.

Once you were educated in chivalry, to the resounding sound of bells, you graduated towards the open gates where the queen parked and paralleled. She put a medal around your heart before the king returned from his departs and in this routine you could be brave, without a princess at stake to save.

To you these memories were safe-kept relics, which not even dragons could burn or blemish. But the dragons came as sure was promised, and with them, the curse of gold.

This gold meant you were sent off to face the world on your own!

You were their prince of inheritance, responsible for the castle town! You had to learn geometry to turn parabolic frowns upside-down! Your fairy-tale was designed to scale the highest rank of hills! Then a princess occupied your tower, taxing your treasury with inflated bills!

You fought red bulls to regain yourself for losing so much traction! You smoked fire with your breath, but alas, you were no red dragon! Cough-cough.

Where did all the dragons go? The last you checked, you didn’t know. You draw a blank; enter St. George bank – the bank with the dragon accolade.

This was your life now and you hoard riches! Gold lemons make lemonade, filling pitchers! The dragon on your credit card is two-dimensional, while all the past is unintentional!

Where did all the dragons go?
Back to when funny, was the funny bone.

Where did all the dragons go?
I don’t know; and neither will they – they the watchers of your tombstone.