Two figures stood waving goodbye,
The man, my father, one foot in the gutter,
Watery blue eyes more apt to fix on nothing
But fixing now on our diminishing car
After a too brief visit.
Beside him, my mother, lined and thinner,
Glad to sit more often
Waving by the privet hedge
Which my father trimmed no differently
Some thirty years ago.
Buildings have grown up
And are dismantled round them.
The school around the corner’s boarded up
And a factory squats on memories
Of fires by night and fights with stones
In the field I played on as a child.
Local voices, local faces, all are new.
We counted back six families
At the paper shop, eight at the grocer’s,
But the lamp-post opposite number two
Which I climbed and fell off as a child
And served as goal-post for our nightly games
Still stands on the kerb before the house
Where Mrs C and her sister lived -
Dead now - like Mr and Mrs H at number four
And Mr B next door whose son was All I have now
Then went his way. His ample wife
Lay ill upstairs for months behind
That Accrington brick sash window -
Beside the one at number eight
Where I watched son Bill embrace his girl.
Now he is grey, his mother in a home.
But still at number ten, standing on the pavement,
My father and my mother. I watch them recede
And wonder will this be the last time
They will stand so, old and sad,
Glad to have seen us, if too briefly,
Waving before that hedged-in house,
With the paint flaking from the window.
©Terry Hodgson2003
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