I visited the old house
where I lived as a young
child, and it was smaller
than I imagined from my
seasoned eyes 60 years
on from when in poverty
I ran barefoot through the
crunchy frost of this cold place.

The house, ramshackle now,
lives quietly in its demise
on a back road behind a
thick set of bushes and
the yard strewn with rusted
items of long ago is where
I played in dirt till the rains
sent us inside to wait again
for another chance to get away. .

The house in winter’s awful chill,
roasted with an open fire and
the heat of my mother’s distain
for life, as all of us siblings found
a way through the poverty and
conflict to each other embrace
in those days of innocence
that somehow still remain.

All of us who lived here as
children, in all those first years
removed and added, stand
in front of the house and wonder
at its standing still, ghost like
at the bottom of a hill with all
the green slopes adding to its
charm in this picture of memory
caught so far and so near away.

 

28/5/2024