I once laid on my stomach here, outside this house,
where now there's gravel spread,
looking in the grass for four-leaf clovers.
The grass got really long back then.
Our neighbour, Mrs Bean, would mow it
sometimes, Mum being too depressed.
I know I never saw the old man mow
the lawn. He lived away most weeks.
It saddens me, coming back this morning,
to find the grass all gravelled over
like it is. It looks like a graveyard now.
Who dug my garden up? Was it him,
my dad, before he sold the house?
He might have, to fatten up the price.
Or perhaps it was the woman I can see.
She’s looking at me as I look at her.
I'm a strange man with a long grey beard
staring at a stranger in a Primark dress
There's forty five years and a lawn between us,
a lawn I used to play in when I was six.
I worry her. Perhaps she’ll call the police
from the front room where my mother died
of heartbreak first, then cancer.
About Bruce Hodder:
Bruce Hodder lives with his wife Michelle in Northampton, England, the most statistically average town in the UK. He has been published in many magazines and online, most recently in ‘Winedrunk Sidewalk’, ‘Under the Bleachers’ and ‘The Rye Whiskey Review’.
Please check out Bruce Hodder's book The Journey Home:
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