Autobiography

I pondered whether to put this in "Autobiography" or elsewhere but it is autobiographical so, although it's back at the time of my infant school days again, that's where I've put it.

Today, on a whim, instead of turning left and going to the supermarket I turned right and went down by my old primary school. I had my camera with me and I intended to take a picture of my infant school. Sadly, since last time I went that way, it has been demolished. It was damaged some years ago in an accident and has been closed ever since but I hadn't realised that they had actually demolished it.  I continued down the short walk that I used to have to my home, no more than two or three minutes away. 

When I got back home I decided to put down the experience as a poem. Here it is.

I close my eyes and overlay the past upon the present
trying to be the child who once stood here;
but he is gone, as is the world whose ghost
paints shadow pictures in my head of how it was.

There is an empty lot, surrounded by boards;
signs that say, "Danger", "Keep Out", "No Trespassing"
and a chain link fence to reinforce the message
that this ground is forbidden now to everyone.

But this was where my first school stood
where in my mind the old brick building's standing yet
where I am letting go of my mother's hand
and entering a world of strangeness and strangers.

This was where I was promoted from bystander to king
in the Christmas nativity, when the king got measles;
and where I was the Knave of Hearts in cardboard chains
with two lines of dialogue I remember to this day.

I shake my head and walk away, cross the old railway bridge
and turn into a cul-de-sac where memory tricks me
and the overlay is scarcely altered from the present
and I pause a moment, startled by the lack of change.

There, at the closed end,  is the entrance to the alley
that led me back home each day from school;
that was the limit of my infant explorations
and the very edge of the world in which I lived.

The alley leads me out into a world of change.
The houses standing here are in the world but not my head
and overlain upon the scene is just one house
that filled the whole ground where now a dozen stand.

In that house, with its gas mantle lights,
with its long thin garden and separate wash house,
with its high walls and fences and its guardian trees;
in that house I breathed my first breath, cried my first tears.

I close my eyes and overlay the past upon the present
trying to be the child who once stood here;
but he is gone, as is the world whose ghost
paints shadow pictures in my head of how it was.