Do you ever think back to the days when days had no end?

Please wait to be seated

The sea-front café had seen many a rendezvous
Couples kissing, sharing a ‘knickerbockerglory’
Holiday families feeding their children

Whose keen eyes scour the sun splashed
Walls lined with black and whites
Trams, beach chairs and bathing ‘costumes.’

Used to love to sit and try to decipher
Which houses are still standing, a familiar
Street corner, the Woolworths sign.

Scones and hot cakes, tea for two
Battered cod and chips for the kids
Real Cornish ice cream perched

In real Cornish cornets that stick
To the tongue and taste of nothing -
Rum and raisin for the dads, strawberry

For mothers wiping small faces
Tying shoe laces, some even on leashes
Sun hats and bonnets, old men with

Hankies knotted at the corners
dozing soundly in the shade
Seagulls eyeing your fish supper.

Holidays were all about consumption
Tea at the sea-front café
Letting your stick-of-rock go gooey

And soft so it splintered into glorious
Candy shards to suck and savour
Running sticky fingers through sun

Ripened hair the colour of Retrievers
Standing at the high counters
Unaware holidays have an end

How sad I was to see the old Café closed
Buckets and spades have given way
To a Help The Aged.

PCW 2005


Reverie

After Dylan Thomas

The moon sweeps her soapy gaze across the dawning lands as workers are stirring, dragging tired sleep weakened limbs from cot and cradle, kettles steaming, babies deep in milky sleep. The postman starts his rounds as last night’s drinkers fumble with keys and latches, trying not to be discovered. Beneath the city trams and morning buses leave their depots, and venture first into the virgin lands to bring man and boy to work. The tides turn, the schools open, another day begins.

The butcher takes his delivery, counting pork backs and mutton shanks into his window shop window, the school teacher counting heads and handkerchiefs, making notes of grubby knees and sickly children. Factory workers stamp their feet and fall in behind machines, shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, high above them the saw tooth slate steaming rooftops begin to breathe.

The children are at their books now, rubber balls and raspberry creams calling from the pocket, the sun warmed chapel walls begin to steam as the carpenter, freshly shaven, sharpens a chisel upon the whetstone. Two lazy lovers roll away from the dawn, two heads upon a pillow dreaming, subtle hands reading bodies beneath the coverlet.

The mayor’s wife, rollered, shakes out her bed smiling at her best antique linen, breast swelling, takes her graces out of tissue paper and sets her hair for the shops. The single mother, the lunches made, her boy away to school, falls to a chair and savours a Woodbine before the cleaning. Somewhere, somebody is crying.

Soon it will be lunch, the school bells will ring, foremen will make their signals, shopkeepers turn their signs, an ancient tradition will live again. The mason and apprentice drop dustily to the scaffold, gripping hot mugs of homely loving tea by the handle, with homemade pasties wrapped in rags. Cafes brace themselves as offices empty. Oiled and suited they come in their gaggles all squawking, demanding lattes, French toast and buttered bagels. School sees the boys, outraged by bananas, swapping fruit for Cadburys swirls and teasing the girls for kisses and a glimpse at their knickers.

Then it’s back to business as the sun makes her move, the dial turns smoothly to welcome a languid afternoon. Stockbrokers and foundry workers, swaddled in their darkly lit caverns, know nothing of day and night, the widow morning passes from memory. Down at the shelter they are feeding the elders, the homeless and toothless, another sap without his dentures, ‘don’t know how he loses them?’ Hot tomato, bread rolls and a whisper of butter to help it go, the tea urn gurgling behind the fat behind of a camomile Christian, who smiling dispenses the rusty brown liquid to the old broken boys grinning their gummy grin to all that can bear it.

And then evening calls children home from school, waiting for their fathers, buses running late again, supper brimming, eggs bouncing in the pan with their dog collared fractures, the ruffled, rubber necked whites slippery and smooth to the touch, slippers warming in the sun, the tabby asleep on the wall. Kitchen smells rise over England, flowery fingers, fish and chips sweating in the bag, families reunited at end of day, their covers worn and slightly broken. Two lazy lovers go back to bed and last night’s drinkers gather at the Hope and Anchor as the moon begins her vigil over those who turn to sleep.

PCW 2005