I Don'T Miss London

I don’t miss the city, the metropolis I once knew was built on the edge of a never-never land. I miss just this: a green half-acre, a cultivated fenced enclosure with a round bandstand; a Victorian structure surrounded by a bed of carnations – prodigious red carnation. That small public garden exists now as a child’s memory. I am told that the wooden rotunda, the pleasant plot, the carnations, the velvety carnations, have all been expunged by the expungers. In that charmed place, a ten-year-old girl once talked to my ten-year-old body as if it were much older. It was then that I saw, coming over a distant horizon, my post-adolescent puberty driving a superannuated Morris Oxford. The car and the girl have probably been erased by those whose job will always be to erase lovely things, but I should like to go back there before my body forgets to treasure the inconsequential. Now with my thread-bare mind, I return again to that wrought-iron, railed patch, of green city space; to be among the deep red carnations, the long since bloomed carnations.