HOUSE CLEARANCE
Propped up in a tatty wicker chair,
Rosebud fixes us with her one good eye.
Her mistress would never have trusted us
with these not-quite-last rites:
the selling, saving for posterity,
sorting; pots and pans to Oxfam,
coats to Help the Homeless,
towels to Save the Seals,
she doesn’t even blink
when we come across the boxes,
one for each of us.
For me: an itemised invoice of drinks
from my wedding, a shank of hair
(Ponytail 1969), too red
ever to have been mine, a poem
about the inestimable love of God
and the nature of forgiveness
a photo, with my Dad torn off.
Rec
She lobs sticks and stones
toward her brother, welly-deep in water,
building another dam across the stream.
Her sister holds a secret meeting,
in the den they made behind the hedge,
password: double sherbet dip.
Between jumpers for goalposts,
her little brother dives manfully in the mud
to prove he’s big enough.
They don’t see the juggernaut coming,
entering the final strait
of its tortuous journey;
picking up speed
to the finish,
agreement reached
to fence the stream, bulldoze the hedge, rip up the grass, cut half the village off
with an ‘A’ Road, an uninterrupted black line of progress all the way to the docks
across pristine salt marsh, mud flat,
football pitch, dam, den, ditch
taking no account of mates
who now live beyond the great divide
but they do agree to an underpass
for safe passage of the cows.
Flight of the dragonfly 