DISTANT WORLD

Nocturnal soliloquies and wandering

are a far cry from childhood days

when we glimpsed the Southport sea

or a convent of cold war Ursulines

prayed mercy for evil Mr Khrushchev.

 

The fairground rollercoaster passage

of years before our family dwindled,

tea shops became an endangered species;

my uncle's crinkle-cut hair, ridiculous

as Kenneth More's carefree tweeds.

 

Unfathomable small-hours delerium

is a far cry from five inside a Vauxhall

and pre-motorway roads down south

to rustic spiders flattened under ashtrays

by grandma in a Cornish guest house.

 

You ask me why the photos are sad.

Because most of them are dead, I said,

and all that history is a distant world

from waking at dawn to my mother

shouting for a husband five years gone.

 

Pennine Platform 91, March 2022, Ed Julia Deakin