Don’t forget
Don’t give in
Don’t forgive
Don’t begin
Don’t undo
Don’t redraft
Don’t renew
What has passed
Past
Photographic evidence
A pile of snaps
From years ago
A half-forgotten time
A party frock
The neckline low
A painted face – sublime
So young, so slim,
With carefree stance
How many now would know
The secrets held
Within her glance
The setting for that show
Do I quite dare
Display this face
A portrait from my youth
Or are the few
Would recognise
Too great a risk of truth
I miss that girl
That piece of me
That juggled many hearts
But see her safer
Mystery
And hidden in the past
Merry-go-round
I ride this bus
And pass the place
Where first I learned of work
Another world
In time and space
New politics and perks
I started young
It must be said
And strove to earn my worth
And struggle on
Two decades late
Still using what I learned
It’s no surprise
It’s changed since then
But somehow seems the same
I guess what goes round
Comes again
In everything but name
Golden Brown
Golden shadows of my past continue to haunt me. I pass corners of streets I remember as filthy, rat-ridden, miserable, and a ray of light suddenly illuminates a memory with a clarity that hits my gut. Forceful as a bolt of chili, straight to the heartburn.
In the everyday I am alone. I am mechanical, stiff, lifeless. I miss these ghostly shadows. Fleeting, they are gone, leaving a strange hollowness. This vacuum of feeling, empty, void. No longer relevant. I shake myself and go on with life. Passing occasionally to cross the road and wonder at changes I see. Proof that life goes on.
And the gold-dusty haze of memory settles on the flat screen of my life. I see things in monochrome, shades of brown and orange. As if through a sheet of bathroom-school-pane glass, everything looks mottled, grainy. And somehow more significant to my story than the things I can touch and smell and taste today in harsh and vivid colour.
Starstruck at Capo d’Anno
I look to the future and what do I see?
My year-ful of past gazing fondly at me.
I turn on my toes and do an about face,
To find myself staring back at my first place.
But try as I might, twist and turn all my days,
The future will greet me, my mind is a maze.
I see now how vain was my endless display,
To seek out my present and past with one eye.
Yet trained in star-gazing and picking up jokes,
Not learning the nature of time, nor her yokes,
I still on occasion, though valiant my fight,
To catch my own tail, pirouette in the light.
Katherine Shirley 