Poetry

Fourteen Powell Street

Cabbage Whites were everywhere that summer,             
my father framed in a JCB cab
drives three quarters up the narrow terraced row,
fetching neighbours out to their doorsteps.
Hands push lever to bucket scrape,
concrete blocks thud into sludge
colonising our front garden.

My back once pressed against upturned hardness
like the corner of a boxing ring.
I’m hiding after the street watched me fight
and lose to fifteen year old Mavis.
My eye turned to a closed mussel shell.

The street sign they forgot to remove still stands
leading to what’s left to the imagination.
Homes now vanished
but amongst scrubland are those slabs
like a memorial that make me blush.

Karl Riordan