The best days of your life
The girl in the nettles, rolled over
and over, for talking posh
the sensational bruise a hockey stick
makes on a mottled leg
the shape of my undiagnosed broken arm
grinding through double maths
acid eating through Mr Reed’s finger
his dance round the lab
dead frogs splayed on dissecting boards
fine silver tools laid out
the screaming boy told the news
by the Head and a distant aunt
that girl sent home for letting
the boy in the local park do what he did
Fridays, the wishing away of calendar weeks
all those last days of term – their pointlessness,
sun on parched playing fields,
creosote drying; pink custard,
the clang of the final bell
on the day I strode out, not looking back
dragging behind me all those years
which would be the making of me.
Curtain Call
… For Gloria, who introduced the Act,
fake-tanned her legs, bought ‘Passion Flame’
by Harmony and all the Revlon
she could carry on the bus, to turn
her sixty years into a glowing forty plus,
… for Henry, who leaped out on stage,
sequinned trousers straining at the thigh,
hoisting shining bars of tantalising steel
and balancing a super-silver budgie cage,
… for Max Maloney’s Show Time Band,
their deafening thud competing with the clash
of Henry’s never-ending “hup, hup, hup”
… for Pepe, Cyril, Lucky, Flash, and all the other
nameless budgies who so gamely went for it,
squeezed neat through hoops, set swings aglide,
pick-pecked their pretty way down wires, pulled cars,
revolved in barrels, looped the loop
… for the audience; those drifting, trailing off;
for all the budgies who may only ever dream
of flight; for all the kings and queens of bedsit land;
for Gloria, her moonlit walks along the sand,
one bedtime drink, old Revlon on the sink.
Out of Time
for David
I see you there still, with your wide-eyed smile,
running into that wave, and out again.
On the shore close by I watched you skip,
small legs at play, kicking their joy
at that new-made world. You’d left them behind,
those five years of life in which you’d learned
to run from the blows in those terrible games,
stopped mid-prance in each instant of shock
as an animal might, until quite tamed.
Fifty years on, and you’re running still,
from a self you never quite learned to own.
All out of time, you let yourself slip
through these last long days, unlinked, unchained.
On the shore close by, I watch you skip.
Cathy Grindrod