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Poem



School was a mile and a half
walk from home,
across roadways, busy streets
and railway lines and through
parklands patrolled
by swooping magpies in spring.
We thought nothing of it
when it was pouring with rain 
or hot as hell. Six year olds
walked a gauntlet of risk 
back then.

Memory can almost recall
an image of each house 
along that daily route, the smells 
that gathered in the doorways
of shops, the reek of urine
wafting out of a laneway 
beside the pub and, still mapped 
upon the mind, where fruit trees 
overhung a fence and were good 
for a seasonal treat.
Each step taken fed the senses
with familiar signposts marking 
the way between home
and the schoolyard gate.

Time has passed 
into a more protective and yet
more dangerous age. Children
are shuttled to school by parents
in bull bar protected SUV's
and buses with flashing lights.
Souls have become 
more brittle under the weight
of an insidious world, perhaps
no better or worse off
than when I walked to school
and danger hid in places where
the senses could go. In my day,
bully boys had names
and were dressed in uniforms.
Now, it is in the odorless
corridors behind digital screens
and in promises where lives
tick away in the sterile 
waiting rooms 
of mortgaged dreams.

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