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Paul Willason | + Follow Poet |
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The Town

I can remember passing through
this town as a child,
stopping for a pie
on our way north.
Now it’s bypassed – barely more
than a clot lodged 
in the spidery veins of a map.
Most of the houses are empty,
the bakery is gone.

I've come here again and stop
to walk beneath
a verandah’s pinholed shade,
past the general store,
the post office
and a butcher shop -
all shut. 
Behind windows, 
generations of dead blowflies
have left a black crust
piled against the glass.
Some hang from webs
like frozen pendulums 
hollowed out by spiders
and passing time. 

Across the street an asphalt
school yard is dissolving into grass.
I think about the children 
who once skipped 
and ran headlong
into their lives from here,
where now a clapped out truck
sits propped up on bricks.
Dumped and stripped of worth
an open bonnet seems to gape
its final breath.

Further up the street,
the scars left
by two world wars
are etched in a modest memorial
to the town's fallen youth.
I run my fingers slowly
down the list of names
and whisper each
into the ethereal silence
in which they rest.
This age has made them unreal.
Elevated on the nations alters
they seem unaccustomed 
to the height.
Their age has them stalking
the nearby hills, irreverent,
all too young, blasting rabbits
and empty beer bottles
lined up like soldiers
with their fathers guns.

At the end of the street,
a gutted church squats like
a full stop to the town.
Nothing is beyond except
a gravel road to somewhere else
and a small cemetery
of lichened headstones.
The last person buried here, I read, 
was Helen O’Brien who died
in august sixty five
and beside her, a year before,
her daughter, aged just four.

I make my way back
and reach out 
to the ghosts that inhabit
this place but can't connect.
A feral cat slinks off
into the shadows of the pub.
Few cars stop here anymore.
Thirty minutes drive away
a multi laned highway 
barrels traffic to the coast.

There, towering apartments
glaze the sky where rooms,
like empty shells,
murmur the lonely sound
of breaking waves.
Sometimes there are evenings
when a sadness rides a breeze 
from inland to the coast
and goes unnoticed, 
except perhaps for a child 
who grows silent
and stares at something 
wandering the distances 
way beyond the reach 
of grown up sight.

Copyright © Paul Willason | Year Posted 2022

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