What Was

In the kitchen I stand

Tracksuit-clad and blinking

As the click of the front door shuts

The sounds of the day away.

I snuff the gas

And the subterranean gurgling fades to naught

As, like a latter-day suburban witch

Leaning over her latter-day potion

I raise the lid of my coffee pot

Damp my fingers in the steam

And enact the tri-part ritual:

Close, lift, and ever so gently pour

A rich and gleaming rope

Of boiling black memoried liquid

Bearing the imprint of half a century of pourings

Into my cup.

Reverently I raise it to my lips

And drink of another old high-ceilinged kitchen

Zig-zagged by light cutting in through the shutters

Half-closed against the sun from the run-around balcony

With its fluttering of uneven ghosts on the line

Which spoke of countless bendings and stretchings

As our mothers down the generations casually

Pegged our lives out there on the washing line:

All this inherent in that single sip.

I dip my toast in coffee, smile

And, fortified, swallow away nostalgia

and am, for now, grateful for what was.

Shortlisted in the Robert Graves Poetry Prize 2018

First published in Literary Yard, 22 August 2018

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