Sunday Reflections 1

I’m back but there are no fanfares, tanned by years
in a warmer clime I look as… I feel, foreign.
But all this fade I’m back in the streets of 1948
black and white the only colour was the green grass
of spring, it was a time when everyone looked old
at twenty five and interviewed by the local paper for
reaching the grand old age of sixty five.

Too bleak for words, nothing here but silenced
screams, the smell of poverty, that clings to the skin,
and empty bottles of booze. I’ll unload my memories
here on the pavement leave them for others to find;
bleached bones, no, I cannot free myself the shackles
too strong , but I can trim it at the ages and make it
pretty by adding a sun and a lamb on a hill.

------

Sunday Reflections 2

Having turned my back to the home town I followed
the coast road, till it veered left and I lost sight of
the sea and drove into a 1950th rural landscape where
horses still pulled the plough.

Stopped across from the small farm where I had
worked as child labourer, healthy life, milking cows
at six in the morning, but I wished they would have
let me be a child a little longer.

Remembering the child was as watching a Bergman
movie, long shots of a flat landscape, little dialogue,
a white church against a rain dark sky, a pitiless god
and preachers of doom.

On my way back to the airport I stopped by the sea, it
was so beautiful that day, and I cried for the lost child,
but I was now free to write my own and better version
of my childhood and in time believe it to be true.