The house, now shorn in two,
as if a cruel wind had cut its swath
through my old bed-room.
The chimney, tall, naked, pointing finger,
a token of the warmth
that fed us around its hob;
where the old man sat
with a taper made from rushes;
and sucked the red flame
into the black bole of his pipe;
and talked of war in Spain,
and Ruskin.
And your mother,
yours and mine, who bore five children;
and loved them all with a joy,
and lived with a joy,
and gave to us all
the joy she found in flowers,
in early mornings,
in rain on the hill,
in Spring and bird-song,
in God knows what.
I saw it all today
forty years after I lost my front tooth
with a Swannie whistle, off the back step.
(where Bobbie Jackson leaned with a cigarette stuck to his lower lip,)
now broken
and hanging loose from the rafter.
The garden,
once neat-laid-out with rails,
and well-trimmed paths and lawns;
overflowing with clarkias, larkspurs,
Canterbury bells, and summer scents;
now a mass of puddled foot-holes
where cows slop,
searching for shelter beneath the leafless elm,
and hunch-backed against the South-west wind,
wait for dawn and hay.
I saw it all
as I stood in the kitchen,
where we used to warm
our early-morning bodies by the stove;
where now, potatoes line the wall like soldiers,
and the stink of blight has replaced
the warm smell of home-made bread
and breakfast bacon;
where a woman,
with eyes as tragic as a dream,
or gay, as a coloured scarf upon the line,
once nursed our sick bodies;
cushioned our pain with potions and lotions
and honey and eucalyptus;
rejoiced in our happiness, and sang
‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ on a
Sunday morning;
listened to the song of the sky-lark;
and when I was ten, the first black-bird.
(What excitement to hear its mating song at first light.)
Or she would stand sometimes,
peering out the small window above the sink
and recite
snippets of Shakespeare’s sonnets,
Shelley or Browning or Yeats’s ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’—
‘I shall have peace now—’
Then the war, her second,
that cut her life
like the knife of Fate
that destroyed the house
leaving only the frail chimney
of remembrance—
sweet, sweet remembrance—
to shame the cancer
that ate away her body.
The house, now shorn in two.
The chimney pointing upwards.
Next time, perchance, I see it,
all the bricks will be scattered wide,
and later still nothing,
nothing to remain but a grass paddock,
as progress strives to hide
the traces of a man and wife
who died.
