Long Street House
It’s up for sale again,
the Long Street house
of our childhood.
This cream chrysalis
once housed our lives.
Fresh paint bandages
deep cracks as old as history.
Inside its rough cast façade,
memory tours each room
and roams the backyard.
The fence pillars I climbed
as a child that seemed
so high, are small.
The almond trees
are gnarled and bent.
The vacant land next door where
rusted out old boilers
grazed like dinosaurs
in the long grass,
has been replaced
by a block of flats.
On the other side,
Mr Oakey's cottage is now
a triple fronted brick veneer.
The secrets that he once hid
in the dark shadows
of vines and overgrown trees
have been sealed beneath
a mote of paving bricks.
Back then his driveway
was a tunnel of treasures,
with tiny bits of coloured glass
and pottery pieces imbedded
in gravel. I would pick them out
and take them home to keep
in a Bex bottle hidden
in a drawer beside my bed.
It was like stolen loot.
After all this time,
our house seems almost
unchanged.
All is familiar. The old
shutters haven't moved
and hang like petrified wings
on the sides of each
front window. Afraid to leave,
you look out from behind
a curtain onto this world
where I am, unable
to get back inside.
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