Past

Free association takes red rattlers

Past classrooms of girls’ plaits and boys’ short hair.

Taught to be polite and the clothes to wear,

The world in real time childhood manufactures.

Names of those who were your feature film

Phase to a phrase, a story or mannerism.

They alive strode the globe and spoke the truism

Who’ve passed to a halo, hello, hollow, hymn.

Bold as a lion and only a pup,

There you meet your father handsome and young,

Younger than you yourself will be again.

And your mother, wise and well, as when

Making a world welcome whence loveliness sprung.

Queenscliff holidays where we would wash up.