In Your Shoes

In your shoes, I’d have wondered what I’m like,
As woman now, and how I was at school.
Did you not ever ask yourself, awake
at night perhaps, if I was beautiful
or clever, happy, mother now to boys
who looked like you, as handsome, tall and blond,
of if, for want of funds and fathering, all joys
had come to nothing, not survived beyond
the day you left us, broke? Life was deprived,
of course, but you gave me a legacy
I prize, you left me hypersensitised
to cruelty and worth – rare gift. I see
right through facades. Not spared a second though,
I’m fine – though I’m the daughter you forgot.

Dorothy Pope

July

Another week of summer gone!
The days are slipping past
The autumn rain comes marching on-
Time runs so fast.

It hardly seems a week or two
Since now was on the hills
And all the gardens shining new
With daffodils.

The phlox, the lilies, that attend
The summer’s grand parade
Now linger to their tattered end,
And roses fade.

And while I bask in summer’s rays
There’s gnawing in my mind
The thought that bleak and bitter days
Creep close behind.

Old Father Time, hang on a tick!
Slow down for pity’s sake
Why do you need to run so quick?
Put on the brake!

John Waddell

Rayners Lane, 1938

As we crest the hill we see
that top-hatted brutal block of a box
with its oblong glass of rectitude
and soft curling prow beneath
pointing towards the edge of the world.
it sweeps us up offering tickets
to a future with no misshapen lives
where we can build a peace
and anything can happen.

Peter Keeble

Birthday

I’m sure someone, somewhere
has a present for me…
and each racing tear
cheering with escape,
glistened her a Birthday chant,
elated as she smiled
through their fall.

The post brought one card,
a month back,
from the mental home,
and it’s spreading feet
clinched the best view
of her tiny, iced room.

Fluttering in-between
window snow flurries,
an elder’s mind grasps at yesterday,
as slowly, a teenage melody warms the air,
rejuvenating some tranquil love affair,
long shackled in the darkroom
of her lonely album.
Around she floated,
bustling on a gust of dreams,
alive and twinkling
from a feast of bygone eclipses
with her Sunday love.


Jerry Pike