Cracker Night at Crouch’s
Access to the Crouch kitchen was via concrete steps in the backyard.
The kitchen was full of Lego pieces.
Not just clickable yellow and red, also windows, chimneys.
Jamie Crouch constructed buildings on the laminex table.
Jamie’s black-bearded father was seldom seen.
His mother was home but not in the kitchen.
The house was made of white bricks.
Burbling boat engines revved in the garage under the house.
The unmowed backyard was full of hunks of fibreglass and metal.
Footwear was always required.
No back fence marked off the yard from the lane behind.
The very place for Guy Fawkes Night -
Jumping Jacks popping on cracked concrete,
the cordite stench of exploded penny bungers,
eyes hauling into night sky tracking skyrockets
launched from a brown beer bottle or lead pipe
by Jamie’s older brother, Peter, obeying the directive to
‘Ignite the blue touch-paper and retire.’
The bedrock bonfire blazed and sputtered,
fed by garden trimmings and grey fence palings.
Sparkler-lit words hung in the air while thoughts fizzed.
A Catherine Wheel, nailed to the garage door,
shed coloured sparks as it twirled and spat,
leaving things not-quite-dark when it finished.
Stringy, grey-white wicks linked our
rippling green and red cracker keyboards.
Jamie, bolting back from the detonation zone,
lost a thong and never broke stride, landing
back in it with his next still-running step.
He stood, heaving, in his oversized hand-me-down shorts.
The yard a week later still bore cracker detritus,
remains of red print on damaged white paper.
Jamie plodded back to his Lego bricks.
Why did he snivel so much?
More engine noise below, door scorch-marks,
Mrs Crouch somewhere inside.
bw
########################################################################
To unsubscribe from the POETRYETC list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=POETRYETC&A=1
|