CATCH-UP                                                                                                   

Four post-war years my senior,

my sister a minor enigma until

four years no longer made a difference

for either one of us; there just came a day

when ordinary discourse was now, we thought,

a real, an actual option: I must have been

about nineteen, knew it was the right time

to forget age and age’s dividing lines.

 

Yet I find it, still, sad to remember

the embers of the slow fire my father lit

with the insistence that I should inherit – and wear –

a pair of my sister’s smart brown shoes

which she’d outgrown and not seen fit

(that bit seemed deliberate) to wear out,

like mine, through wars in muddy woods,

splashing in streams, playing football gods.

 

Her four-year start meant a year or so

catching up in size – otherwise I’d

go barefoot (and so I did, as and when I could).

I guess it was a bad year for money –

funny how I’d had no clue, not grasping

the proposition that internal strife usually grew

from life outside the family inner sanctum

then seeped through walls of huts and mansions.

 

And there was no family fighting force to

blow off course the arrows that pierced his flesh;

the unseen foe, so far as he could see, just

grew and multiplied, no-one ever took his side,

ever alone, because he never asked,

save only while he wept in the quiet night,

while he thought we slept and wouldn’t hear

his sobs of loneliness and fear.

 

And it hurts me still when I recall

the hate I felt when we were the only

kids on the estate who never had a bike

to strut our stuff. He said it was enough to

have the old black lady’s one in the shed –

not the best for the three of us but, god’s truth,

that Raleigh flew like shit off a shovel

when the crossbar boys were out for trouble.

 

All this seemed the natural, the proper

way of things: we the lepers, they the kings.

Yet time did pass, as did most irrelevancies,

and I somehow knew I’d put my future first,

no bursting need to put father’s feet to the fire;

he did once enquire whether I was going to

punch his nose for what I knew was all about

the meds that turned his poor head inside out.

Why do I remember, exhume such things,

all from more than fifty years now gone?

I suppose the answer that chimes inside

is the idea, when I picked a pen to write this down,

of catching up with someone’s age – no sage need

be engaged to validate the simple, solemn notion that I

never did catch him up: the trees of early adulthood

were still too many to see any wood.

 

And so we never had those conversations,

words over a pint or equivalent rituals,

never learned how to forgive or to be proud,

not embarrassed, together in a crowd.

But I’ll keep for ever the moment when,

one night, we dropped a girlfriend at her place;

I was glued to my seat so he simply said

“aren’t you going to…?”, so I did and off he sped.