It’s just that turn of evening
when light starts to forget what it meant to say,
and all the birds look to hide their colours
in tiny lanes rising anywhere round the garden.
Now the last of whoops and sorrows
pour down hill roads to bunch at traffic lights.
Footsteps chaperone a voice to some random spot
where it calls a name: a friend, perhaps,
a bare acquaintance, a place of magic
from a summer long braided in dust.
In such a moment, a tap at the window
might bring you face to face with you
aged, say, eleven – eager beneath uncertainty,
shifting from foot to foot. You might go out
to where he stands, among creepers and shrubs
you’ve tried to memorise the names of,
while he was happy just to befriend their scents.
From there he might lead you a dance,
ad-libbed and unhurried, out to the by-way
at the back, all else dissolving.
Along it, you might learn
what you never knew he knew. Joys
that blew past you at the time, made you blink
like the smuts from when trains had
fearless windows. Secret places
that caught him up in their spells,
though you only remember, if at all,
hoofing round them between
Sunday-shirt events. You might learn
why he really laughed at the world
or was struck all of a heap
by the singular cut of its trousers.
Back in the garden, in the house,
your present might sigh deeply, tap its watch.
But you will be far gone now, as the by-way
breeds new turns among heavy-head broom
and cyclamen you never so much as fingered –
till at last you reach the spit of the hill
he drew on your last day at primary school,
where you will drop from sight
and the spirit you’d long laid under muslin
will again become all the sky,
will sing all the time remaining.
Michael W. Thomas’s latest poetry collection is Nothing Louche or Bohemian, a collaboration with poet Tina Cole (Black Pear Press, 2025).
more details here:https://blackpear.net/authors-and-books/michael-w-thomas/tina-cole-and-michael-w-thomas-nothing-louche-or-bohemian/
