A house, nothing fancy, now empty.
Asked to go back and pack
"Take whatever's left" they said
"Just leave the art, that's your aunts"
So slowly, silently we walk through the place
which never was but always felt like
home
A place once packed so full of life and lives
Deathly quiet
Pictures which once received a fleeting glance
Now seen with wide eyed fixation
Has that always been there
Did I always miss it?
Rooms that used to teem
Now holding nothing but echos of our innocence
Mummers of a time when days were long and lazy
Ice creamed sticky fingers catching an old fuzzy ball
How do I absorb this place?
Drink it into me so I cannot forget
So many days spent unaware
We'd only have a fleeting moment
To pack years
The kitchen filled with cutlery
from far flung corners of the world
Spoons from Spain
Forks from Fiji
You'd bring warm treacle tart
from the oven with a flourish
Hours spent making every tasty bit
The Sainsbury's packet conspiratorially binned
A conservatory breathing life
Chewy branches spilling over their pots
onto the noble bust of the wisest man I ever knew
A bronze eye twinkling still
The sofa moved just enough to cover
the spot where once a brother trod
perhaps a bit too hard on the blunt end
of a sewing needle. Straight to the bone.
Six hours later a triumphant return
from A&E now bonded with the Designated Uncle for life
A house that once was filled with life
Now sits suspended
Purgatorialy waiting to start again
The dust hangs, drifting
A universe only half visible
There in beams of light
Then gone
Waiting to be disturbed
And you forget those sprinklings of dusty atoms
Are always there
So thick you think you should feel them on your tongue
Then the light goes
And they're gone
And soon this house will start again
Down the road the masts and sails
tinkle guiltily in the wind
A choral eulogy to the
place where we grew up.
