Evacuees
They learned our faces
like new poems
out of their book of houses.
Hard lines from Deal and Walmer -
quick voices down from war,
paced against the burrs,
the burnt-out ferns,
weals of furse and stunted oak.
At first knuckles on cheeks
and taunts of ‘townees’
because we laughed at their ‘dear beauties’
superstitions of lucky stones and dates.
We scoffed the hogs pudding,
and Sunday’s saffron treat,
the stargazy pie cooking
older than the famines.
Safe until a gale’s blitz
went boom in the night
and left street-lines of wreckwood -
the dunes pitted with craters.
We shared the four-letter rhymes -
the dare of grown up words
hollered in the shelters’ stench
of bricks and urine.
Our war doodling
under buzzards till rooks came
like hurricanes for dogfights,
and we left in trains,
took a sun’s incendiary - evacuated streets
like those in Lydd and Ashford.
Sometimes we’d write,
send down a wish to our Cousin Jacks,
for an ocean
wider than a thousand Serpentines.
The clout of cobwalls, outside taps
and top of garden lavatories,
remembered like verses of a poem
made-up from bombed out words
and clutch of gasmasks in the rain.
Page(s) 5
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