Most poems about growing up look back through a warm, golden haze. Rachel Habraken's "Flicker" listens instead. It begins with sound, "ambient calls" that drift out of the past, and what they carry is not comfort but a quiet verdict: childhood was never what the speaker thought it was.
The first line is the most formal in the poem. "Ambient," "transcend" and "pillars of the past" sound almost architectural, as if memory were a ruined temple with voices echoing between its columns. Then the language shrinks. The calls become "lurid," "distorted," "haunting me now," each word on its own line, so that the reader is made to stop at each one. "Lurid" is a striking choice, since it usually describes garish colour, not noise. Giving a sound a sickly glare blurs the senses together and makes the memory feel unstable and slightly feverish. The poem never says what the calls actually are, and that vagueness helps. They could be any of the everyday noises that once marked a child's world.
The speaker's claim that the calls haunted her "as they did back when I believed / in make-believe" is easy to read past. If they haunted her then too, even childhood was less simple than it now appears. What has changed is their message. They now "call out / old little familiarities," a phrase that sounds tender, almost cosy, because of that shrunken "little." The next line removes the tenderness: "now they tell me that / childhood is only an illusion." The word "now" keeps coming back ("haunting me now," "Only now," "now they tell me," "now know"), and each repetition pushes the speaker further from the time she is remembering. The poem is built on that gap between then and now.
The "believed / in make-believe" pairing is a small piece of wordplay with a sting in it. The same root appears twice, but the second use is hollow. The poem later returns to the idea with "whatever I once believed in." That "whatever" is telling. The speaker doesn't name what she believed, perhaps because the content no longer matters. What she has lost is the ability to believe at all.
The central image is the candle, whose "soft light" once "lit up" that belief and has now "burned to the end of its wick." The sounds in these lines are gentle ("soft," "light," "candle"), and then the final phrase ends on a hard, clipped "wick." That word sets up the poem's only real rhyme. Its partner arrives in the last two lines: "And it flick-- / Flickers away." The rhyme between "wick" and "flick" is easy to miss, but it suggests that the ending was already contained in the image.
The form acts out the meaning. Earlier the speaker stumbled on "I-- now know," a dash that works like a flinch before an unwelcome fact. The poem breaks off mid-word again at "flick--," and the repeated stutter links the speaker to the flame. Her voice falters as the light does. Then the title word finally arrives whole, "Flickers," at the very end, as if the poem could only finish the word once the light was nearly gone. The verb is also gentle. The flame doesn't go out or die; it "flickers away," a fading that leaves open whether anything remains.
The rhythm supports this. There is no regular metre and no rhyme scheme, only lines of one or two beats that give the poem the hesitant pace of someone speaking slowly. The long, abstract first line gives way to short fragments, so the poem seems to lose its grand vocabulary as it goes, much as the speaker loses her illusions.
What makes "Flicker" worth reading is its restraint. Disillusionment is usually described with big gestures, but here it is a small domestic image, a candle in a quiet room, and a voice that cannot quite finish its sentences. The poem also contains a quiet irony. It insists that childhood is "only an illusion," yet its strongest feeling comes from how much the illusion still matters. A speaker who truly felt nothing would not be haunted, and she would not stammer.