BIRTHPLACE

Posted by Admin on 25 January 2009, 12:00 am

It looks a happy house;
so bright with hard-gloss paint
and showy new white coat –
its garden (where I lay
with whooping cough when time
forbore to move) unmarred
by children’s play, so trim,
exclusive, smug, behind
a wall on top of which
parures of purple in
their leafy clusters cling.

It looks a happy house;
but as I pass, athirst
to know what changes five
and fifty years have made
within, I wonder if
old houses ever quite
forget the sorrow they
have seen, or if some dark
ectopic memory disturbs
the harmony of those
who knew it not.

It looks a happy house;
but when I last was there,
a boy of fourteen then,
the grief those bricks enclosed
was of a potency
to haunt a thousand years.

T. C. Hudson

© T. C. Hudson.

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