In those days

My parents, shoe-workers, never owned a car
so the Sunday walk down to the meadows
was a respectable two-mile stretch for our short legs
during those halcyon afternoons
of my childhood.

This morning, the long drag to the stone bridge
spanning the Ise Brook,
that we boys knew as “the river”
feels eerily quiet, few cars
just like in the sixties
although the road is undoubtedly wider,
now metalled and less gravel,
the ironstone bridge also reinforced.

Cow parsley narrowed the lane
in those heady days, whipping our bare white legs
as we sped recklessly downhill toward the meadows,
trainspotting and sticklebacking our only thoughts
badly maintained bike chains churning and clanking
brake blocks smoking and squealing.

Only now can I own up to being frit
by that perilous descent
and notice the absence of today’s children doing the same
double-daring, egging each other on
to certain oblivion,
arses up, chins rubbing handlebars
in those breakneck downhill races.

The brook swirls drowsily, disappointingly
overrun with weed, dead branches and litter
a far cry from the shin-deep waters I recall,
it seeps, almost embarrassed around its obstructions.

There seem to be fewer trees too, and rape
in the meadow instead of corn,
I consider that I shouldn’t have come
then get distracted by a diesel gliding by.

I lean against the bridge’s warmed stones
and wonder where those school friends are now,
and for one brief moment, the straw scent
blows across my face, sweetly damp
and swallows dive to sip from the stream.

Eyes closed, the distant clank of steam
vibrates from the up line,
45581 perhaps, Bihar and Orissa
the only Jube missing from my book,
but instantly I am snapped back by the raucous horn
of a massive tractor, one of today’s leviathans
the spell broken

© Graham Sherwood 12/2017