Alison Cassidy - Babysitting

It was an empty sort of day -
one of those that merely fill the gap
between Christmas and New Year.
The air hummed with the sounds of suburbia.
A train rumbled by.
A dog barked
and the tiny bundle
in the sling at my breast
slept.

I set off with a light heart
and a certain déjà vu
as my childhood stamping ground
Tintern CEGGS -
came into view,
grander now than I remember her
and smaller too.

The old pine forest,
where cubbies grew
and secrets were confessed,
had been usurped
by shiny new houses
and gardens wilting in the summer dry.
But the odd cream fifties' brick
still peeped through the trees -
then newly planted,
now huge and white
and home to caroling magpies.

I remember those bricks
and the terror that gripped,
when - eight years old -
I was instructed to
take off my outdoor shoes
and put on my indoor shoes
and brave a mob of girls
who all knew each other.

Later I pass the railway station
where we sat for hours
as smelly adolescents
embarrassed by bloody evidence
of a change longed for
yet not fully understood.

And Stanley Avenue,
where we trailed our heavy bags and hockey sticks
and whispered wide-eyed tales of Peika Gaye.

I recall the madrigals
and the dying Silver Swan
and the trembling fingers
of Mozart’s Fantasy in D.

Miss Wood must have long since gone to God
and taken with her
her love of Latin
and Jacquie Halpern,
my best friend
killed in a car accident
at sixteen.

Young Dylan was still asleep
when I returned.
I must offer to babysit again.

Alison Cassidy

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/babysitting/