The Tearful Journey
(Memories of Old Murston, Kent.)
Banished barges languish in their still, quiet moorings -
Red-rust rotten and fragile.
The jagged hulls cut no trough deep into these forgotten waters.
Becalmed and bereft,
Lonely to lapping the crumbling quay -
Ghosts of memory.
The road dragging back and away from the weeded moorings,
Like cartooned crazy paving,
Yawns through debris of Pump-House, Office and Machine-Shop -
Roofless skeletons they lay
Like bones, in silence,
But for resentful birds.
The careless-strewn, once-gleaming artefacts of once-happy industry -
Rusty wheels past revolution.
And Workmen’s cottages stood once over there. No
More to the left, perhaps. A garden path,
Still visible beneath the wild and rampaging black-berries,
Holds imperfect union with the deserted street where,
Nine years old, and gallant,
I pledged my troth to Carlene cousin.
No peak-capped sentry peeps out now,
From his hide-away, with warning -
‘Run along It’s dangerous here for boys and girls’
(Especially girls). The grandmothered cottage,
That we would loudly race to,
Is lost for ever to dust and grass. Small and shining,
A jagged remnant of black-hearth brings back
Hot baked potatoes that burned small fingers.
The Corner Shop has politely crumbled with a view to
Revealing the orchard, where in secret moments,
With hearts pumping,
We would pillage the apple trees. The Factory Siren
Is now long silenced. Nearby
The Old Church lingers on defiantly,
Watching over its scattered remains.
Precious little remains
Of that small, wide-eyed boy who would
Run jumping with terror
Amongst the tombs and flaking gravestones,
And again now, after so many happy-family years
Begins the tearful journey -
Home.
Page(s) 9
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