Places (Then, Now, Soon)

Poetry!



[A digital collage with a beige background. A large white cloud hangs in the backdrop from the top left corner. There is a quaint yellow-framed window in the centre, decorated with sunflowers. In the left background and the right foreground are trains running along wooden structures towards the right side of the image. Also on the right side and framing the window is a wooden garden trellis. All this stands on a colourful wildflower meadow.]



1. A Garden
2. Red Roses
3. Sense of Place
4. Physical
5. Library World
6. Trains I
7. Trains II
8. Ants
9. Flowers
10. Moving
11. Clubroom
12. The Clearing
13. A Garden II
14. The Museum
15. Community Gardens
16.The Island
17.
18.
19.
20.

Spoiler

Collage - images of trains:
Photo by Andy Lee: https://www.pexels.com/photo/colorful-m ... -28445382/
Photo by Tom Fisk: https://www.pexels.com/photo/aerial-vie ... s-7221990/

Other images are my photos/ paintings!

1. A Garden

You don't have to live on the crumbled remains
of the statue we used to walk by
on our way to school.
The one with the snarling face,
the bright marble forehead
which shot sunlight directly in our eyes.
One evening our teacher left us to polish it,
trusting the stone dragon to watch us
over herself.
Now there are no more scales. No more fierce eye,
no more curving teeth. You kneel on a broken thing
and polish the coral-like mass of rock
where a sculpture once stood.

Why not, instead, plant a garden?
Why not beans running up and down
the sides of the pedestal? Why not flatten
the rough surfaces? Why not a flower box
to sit atop the ruins instead?
Why not crocuses, why not marigolds?
We could build vegetable beds in the rubble,
in the green, green grass. Grow courgettes
in the circle of crab apple trees,
whose shortness once made the dragon look tall.

And beside the flowers, let us build a bench.
You and I could sit and watch the sun
as it drips into the houses down the road.

2. Red Roses

Red roses,
newcomers,
new colour,
few petals.

Red roses,
red thorns,
in our dry bush
a sudden green
and stems
too haughty
for climbing.

Red roses,
taking nutrients
from the daisies,
the nasturtium.

Red roses,
soft and velvet,
sweet nectar,
a smell
that became
a fragrance.

Red roses,
windblown,
survivors,
hanging on.

Red roses,
autumn rain,
round droplets
like jewels.

Red roses,
a hard climb
but a soft view:
the tips of grass,
every fresh mushroom.

Red roses,
in winter
withered,
dry,
white with frost.

Red roses,
a labyrinth,
an adventure
with my sweetheart.

Red roses,
petals stripped
to bury the fallen.

Red roses,
petals coated
in summer light.

Red roses,
new family,
their first
tall climb.

Red roses,
the shadows
I see first at dusk
returning home.

3. Sense of Place

Night-sky stars
a far-away vastness
brings our eye-level upward.
We could walk through
the high street all day but
stare at the sky
all our lives.

Not all at once,
but in the toy shop windows
and their darkness before
the day begins
and the cafe
with the mural
of Mars, Venus, and the moon
and in the twinkle motif
on the charming stone paths.

They planted trees
to enclose us
from the terror of openness
but standing underneath
every ornamental pear
I see a great green galaxy.

4. Physical

We built a post office
to send each other letters
and the soft flip-flop
of an envelope in hand.

It was two storeys high
with two narrow floors,
a bookshop on one side,
an open window, the other.

We built a post office
on a new shopping street,
on the now-unfenced land
of some once-big estate.

The owner of the manor
gave away all his dollars
to talk fantasy novels
in the shop next door.

We built a post office
to send each other mail:
some spices, some tea,
some heirloom seeds.

(And these were safe to send
because we all lived in town
and a nice plant here
wouldn't turn nasty there.)

We built a post office
which hired many teens
to skateboard down the street
in jeans and a mailbag.

It kept them all fit
and away from their phones
and we all got our letters
with some gossip and news.

We built a post office.
We had paper to spare.
Everything was good
in the future, somewhere.

Spoiler

This one didn't end up where I thought it would but hey, that is the fun of NaPo.The structure is partially inspired by 'New York is Real (and I made it)' by mothcub (cw: some mild blood/body talk, also links to a YouTube video), and the idea comes from this random conversation I had with my Mum where we were imagining . . . a mall in a virtual/fictional environment, where one of the lots would be taken up by a magical post office that would allow you to leave or send a message to other regular mall-goers.

5. Library World

Inspired by Brenda Coultas's Bowery Mind

Everyone always talks about how good a public library is, but it is a different thing to live it: something we say about mountains, rivers, crystalline oceans.

There are beds in our library
There are looms in our library
There are people.

In my average day I eat at the cheap cafeteria on the ground floor, then spend the morning and afternoon switching between

the colourful crafty 3rd floor, with its collage walls, and the 5th floor
with its stained glass windows, radiating rainbows with the sunlight.

Ground floor: someone always gets a second helping of pumpkin soup.

Kids eat for free, forever.

5th floor: an artist paints sitting by a glass depiction
of an artist painting.

3rd floor: once a kid stood guard by a wall of handprints, telling passers by that "This is me, and this is my sister, and this is Max, and this is Kimi."

5th floor: a student lays out all the histories of a dead city on a table and brings it back to life within a community college.

3rd floor: when we finish the jigsaw puzzle, the picture shows us where our train tracks should go.

Everywhere: somebody comes to water the plants on the windowsills, by the armchairs, and up on the roof garden, where we are growing tomatoes in boxes.

And maybe the funding and the maintenance for it all comes mostly from imagination. But the bookshelves we dream of are stores of imagination, sparking more dreams from the dreams that exist. A perfect circular economy.

6. Trains I

On the train ride to school
we passed through
a concrete cave,
the kingdom of mushrooms.

I grew up counting them.
I won a talent show at ten,
then fought with my best friend at fifteen.
I kept looking out for special ones:
a different colour, a strange shape,
smooth pale ones,
wing-like brown ones,
iridescent tiny ones.

After twenty-three,
I lost count. I moved
to an apartment. Now my train ride
passed through a world of bright tile mosaics.
Dizzying patterns of red, turquoise, ochre.
You and I talked in that kaleidoscope,
clattering fragments in our everyday,
and the same dream like a kiln.
One day we'd start busking at this station.
One day we'd be a real band.
We laughed together at the last stop
a week before you flew home for good.

I don't think I'll ever ride a plane.

Yesterday I took the train to see my parents
and caught a single phosphorescent mushroom
amid the mass of life.
I counted to one.

Spoiler

Inspired by the Stockholm metro! I've never been, but I watched this cool documentary on it and it made me think about how a well-decorated metro system could be part of a person's life.

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7. Trains II

To get from this city to the next
you took the dragon.
His serious face
washed with golden light
from his eyes
as he shot down the tracks
and slowed to a perfect stop,
green scales gleaming.

Inside, the pink floor
reflected each passenger.
The witch was a purple swish.
The chef a white-and-black blur.
The lemony light hung
suspended, perfectly still
even as trees whooshed by outside.
Through your feet,
the hum of dragonsong.

You made the dragon,
you and the witch and the chef,
who was an engineer once,
in another life.

You built his flanks
from the broken pieces of cars,
melted them down and reformed them
into hardy scales
that could tilt to disperse rainwater.

The chef recombined his innards
from disassembled weaponry,
dissolved an arms factory
into smooth engines
and electrical wiring.

The witch gave him power
from the awe of dragonkind,
taught him to grumble at vandals
and snarl when the council
threatened to cut his funding.

Soon you will all disperse
into different cities,
and for the witch
a cave by the sea.
But for now the rumble,
the sense of floating
and maybe flight
is a reunion.

Even if they have
remodelled the lights.

Spoiler

Inspired by @Spearmint's prompt to write about liminal space! I'd done a train poem just before mint and I swapped prompts, but she inspired me to consider trains *as* liminal space, which led to this piece.

I also was inspired by @Ventomology's cowboy sonnet in the writing of the chef's stanza.