Memory Lane

Memory Lane

Blinkered and ear-muffed

You don’t want to register

The changes that progress

Has unleashed on your home town.

Half a century later

MacDonald’s and Sainsburys grazing

Where there were fields, oak lined,

Sheep bleating out lambs this time of year.

An Odeon Cinema has colonised the dog track

Where you gathered used betting stubs,

Slipped the track barrier and coursed

Like a hare from the hounds.

The convent bolted and shuttered.

The nuns transplanted to suburban

Housing estates. Mercy Nuns-

Not shamed, but old-

Unsustainable as a going concern.

Church pews still implacable.

More so now to creaking knees and neck too stiff

To crane after forbidden object of desire

As you were once want.

None of your peers.

Did they migrate, like you,

To wider pastures?

Or aged beyond recall

Like you- a ghost of yourself

Looking for a bend in the road

That’s no longer there.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2017

Goodbyes

Letting Go

Without ceremony I binned your letters

Shredded and tossed in an Ikea office bin

Transferred to a Panda Grey

Not to be recycled

Never to be re-read

I watched them dragged and hoisted onto a conveyor belt

Pierced by gigantic Panda teeth

Imagined them flung in a land fill or incinerated

Leaving behind the smell of a Sweet Afton

The taste of a Blue Nun

And memories as seemingly random

as the toss of a dice.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016

Are we nearly there?

The Rear View Mirror

Your eyes would meet in the rear view mirror.
He, strapped in his child seat,
Wearing his teenage mutant hero turtle costume
Leonardo or Donatello or Michelangelo
You can't remember which.
And he'd ask, "How far is it?"
And you'd pretend to know;
"Just around the bend or nearly there."

And years later, still back-seated
But wearing that teenage boy long lost look
Staring out the window at his dreams
Whizzing by and no longer asking,
Knowing your bends were hairpin,
And treble at that.

Now empty grey upholstered seats
And no queries about destination
Or time or speed or direction;
Just him up the road ahead of you
Waiting for you to catch up.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016