Even Prompter

A First Neighbourhood

A First Neighbourhood

Plumstead, the neighbourhood of my childhood
(and do not neighbourhoods belong to children?),
a land of little houses on quarter acre plots
and the lattice of straight roads between them,
arena for the games our little gang invented,
up and down the street and in the vacant plot,
and the wide field at the far end, open grassland
bounded in the distance by main road and other
houses, where the dogs could run and hunt for moles
that they never caught, but the fun was in the dig.

Deliveries by horse and cart (long since vanished)
and my father with haste and spade, following
to harvest the contributions for his compost heap,
the warm and fragrant source of garden success.
I do remember he planted bottles as well as plants,
the theory being, the sound of wind across their necks
would keep the moles away. It may have worked
for I never saw a molehill in our yard, front or back.

It was another world, a place lost long ago,
though I can trace the streets on Google Earth,
still laid in lattice pattern between the houses,
but gone even so, the people changed or moved away,
a diaspora of childhood scattered by the wind
of time, blowing over Table Bay and the mountain.


Line count: 24
Free verse
For Promptly Poetry, Week 15
Prompt: Write a poem about your neighborhood.