Liverpool Poems
Street music
Sparrows, starlings and seagulls
dive bombing
screech above the naked and
exposed furrows of nearby fields,
rousing me from my infant sleep.
I make my way to the kitchen accompanied by the
whistle and hiss of the radio; mother searching for
music,
clicking buttons
Hilversum,
Dortmund
Luxembourg.
Grimacing I drag the squealing chair to the sink
against the red tiled floor.
I clamber onto the seat;
its rickety legs dance a tattoo.
Turning on the tap to wash my face;
I recoil as the whoosh of bubbling silver
splashes the porcelain, spraying ice cold my
knees.
The muted breathing of the gas beneath the kettle and
scraping of toast hoarsely whispers that
school is not far off.
Slamming door merges with the clinking of milk bottles,
rattling inside crates carried by the trundling horse drawn
cart.
I pause briefly,
admiring the grey dappled horse whose soft snorting
frosts
the morning air,
enveloping its lugubrious velvet features in matching
grey mist,
and begin my long walk to school.
Schoolyard child cries mingle with the whirring of
skipping ropes and the dull thud of hop-scotching
plimsolls;
the gentle cacophony is broken by the hand held school
bell reverberating on concrete and brick.
The playground sonata gives way to scraping of chairs,
the
clunking of desk lids,
the
rustle of
comics.
Blackboard chalk squeakings and broken
clicks,
announce that our daily lesson begins.