Driving home from Colchester
An english day in Castle Park;
Scattered figures pinned to a stark
Vivid wash of bare autumn sky.
Puddles, acorn cups and the high
Skirl of children working at play,
A dizzy business of sway,
Spinning swings, brutal delight,
Simple trust and sudden spite.
On the still-peopled cricket square,
Colder currents stir clement air
Where summer’s last fours pock the boards
To sparse cracklings of thin applause.
The tired lake lulls and nuzzles boats
Corralled for winter, quartered close
By dough-bellied ducks; amply fed,
Aloof adrift, they scorn our bread.
Free at last in the playground’s press
My children learn, deceive, possess.
One alone, her own aims, own ends,
The other making instant friends.
Outside the playpark’s undertow
Most adults fidget, useless, know
Their place, and pace the picket fence,
Irritated by time’s suspense
As my children career and fizz
I try to frame what childhood is.
Grown up dreams still trip and stall there;
My father’s shadow faintly falls there.
These stills and clips are spliced by time,
Conjured by scents or words or chime
Of a chanted singsong taunt,
Its ricochet not yet quite blunt.
Driving back home, time slows, eyes close
With heads afloat they loll and doze;
In the car’s hot womb, word on word
A drowsy story spools unheard.
Fat spatters of rain blob the screen,
The wipers smear a gauzy sheen,
Mix and smudge the running world
Through a veil of rain, misted, pearled.
Impossibly sudden, it stops.
Trapped in the car’s amber we drop
Through blue, over road into sky,
Smaller, caught in a camera’s eye
Filling the shot with a sleeping face,
Panning to wide screen open space
And a tiny car crawling home
Lost against the horizon’s dome.