I
Old country platform, the last service gone.
Timetabled songbirds chirping on song, as they
Check tired walkways for crumbled remains,
Of yesterday’s sandwiches, yesterday’s trains.
Brightly tabarded, young workers refresh,
Baskets of quainties, dry hung in coarse mesh.
Dripping their oranges, snow whites and yellows.
Her favorite colour, his thought, as the meadow
Erupting in crows yelling shrieks of war cries,
The bird scarer’s victims reach up for the sky.
Hurling their curses on enemies unseen,
Then floating back earthward, to feed on the green.
Creak oily swings protest gates sliding shut,
With a “thunk-ker-ker-thunk” when their centers abut.
And a breeze from the marsh, boils up to a squall,
Proving the forecasters right after all.
The last time she left him, the weather was thus,
A mist quiet morning brought afternoon fuss.
On the fast train to Hastings then changing for Rye,
Where she never arrived, 30 years come July.
Back before steamers were dieseled away,
No mobiles, no phones nor texts of dismay.
All he received was a telegraphed message,
“Railway bombed. Wife dead in wreckage”.
II
They wouldn’t permit him to see her remains,
“Her burns were extensive”, the doctors explained.
And strong as his urge to prize open the cask,
The box remained closed as the sealers had asked.
That time spent in grieving was painfully slow,
A freight train all stop-start and signals hung low.
But brightening his dawn in the new age electric,
Came overhead power lines and measurements metric.
Scaling the heights of his shaft of despair,
Emerging at last from that cavernous lair.
A chance encounter on platform eight,
When she’d missed her taxi and he too was late.
The short hour from London soon passed in bright talk,
They’d much more in common than either had thought.
Since both of their spouses were lost in the fight,
Each held the other’s pain all through that night.
Hers gone three years since missing in France,
His had been taken by stray bombs of chance.
And growing together, pressed further adrift,
From smarting horizons gave spirits a lift.
So now every evening, at twenty past four,
He strolls down the platform to wait by her door.
While she fills out papers, sets the alarm,
And they walk to their cottage, each arm in arm.
© Sam McKeon 2015
appetite-2-write 