(memory Chest) Excursion On The Cathedral Express Poem by Janice Windle

This was written after we had an unexpected encounter with a classic steam engine at Waterloo Station in London, late in the evening after I had just been talking about my memories of the station from my childhood. You can read this poem illustrated with photos taken by Dónall on that occasion, on my 'Poems' blog at blogger.com (the full address is in my biography) or on my Myspace blog at www.myspace.com/janatartwork4udotcom

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Waterloo Station. Lines
of late evening commuters
craving croissants, waken
from half-daze, look up,
amazed. Beyond the ranks
of orange coaches, bound
for Haslemere and Portsmouth Harbour,
the Cathedral Express belches
memories in clouds
up to the dark roof.
Angry dragon breath
hisses like molten lava
meeting ocean. The sound
solidifies a moment
more than half a century gone.

My hand, warm in woolly mitten,
tightens in my father’s reassuring grip.
I’m five again. We’re both
dwarfed and deafened
by screams and roars, Waterloo
a cavern lined with monsters,
steam power harnessed, iron horses
tended by dark stokers,
grimy half-gods mastering the elements.

Waterloo a portal, the Tube
a wormhole where I run,
shouting to the echo, drunk
on freedom after travel, then out
to catch the trolley-bus,
sit upstairs to watch
the trailing wires
miraculously cross, uncross,
as we turn corners, pass
other buses, and at last
we walk along the gap-toothed terrace

past

the bomb-site, where
forlorn fireplaces hang in air;
crumbling walls carry
memories of cream distemper,
and rose-sprigged paper;
sinks and baths remembered
by broken tiling; tangled wires
exposed; empty window frames:
weeds inhabit space
where once a family
would work and play.

And so to Grandma’s
for a Sunday lunch
and tea with buttered crumpets
toasted at the fire
and Grandpa, cigarette on lip,
with grumbling kindness
plays ragtime music on the old Joanna
and my childish life’s so simple
and so warm, so very long ago.