Through a side gate, whose unassuming frame

is draped in swags of pale wisteria

like hairstyles worn by Victorian girls,

I return to a half-remembered space,

its neat enclosure more clearly defined

by flint walls than the past will ever be;

 

and where parched lawns, diminished and threadbare

in the unseasonable heat, mark out

a territory that can’t now be repossessed –

the tiny fortress of Forbury Hill,

the bandstand’s lookout, and the benched refuge

we reinvented as a secret cave.

 

Today even the lion towering above 

his plinth seems at a loss to justify

those fallen in Afghan wars, staring,

muscle-bound, into a sky where cranes loll,

ponderingly, raising disposable

futures from a debris of junked decades.

 

Like vague impulsive ghosts, those earlier selves

who rampaged in drab, unfashionable

clothes, our echoes trapped as a sibilance

in the tunnel that brought us, crash landing,

onto holy ground: a ruined abbey’s

lost domain of ritual and trauma.

 

Hagiography and a dead language

bound us to our past, the tedium also

of a Corpus Christi parade winding

slowly through these gardens, the air heavy

with hymns and incense, my tired head mesmerised

by a thurible clattering against its chains.