The landscape changes by the day,
haunting our lives in many furtive ways.

It’s not just the failing sun, the ghosts
of darkening evenings creeping in
that halts the step, not the steady drip
of leaves from widowed trees, great
oaks felled, the rows of shattered
flowers gunned down by feckless winds

it’s not just that: a season gone, a
season lost with all its rainbow colours,
autumn’s melancholy catalogue.

It’s the human landscape, altering by
the hour, by the minute, that makes
one falter – the shrinking list of friends
you’d meant to call but never quite
got round to, the tables you can no
longer fill, the dwindling cast at
family celebrations, grave occasions,
houses boarded up, their owners gone
moved permanently on, letters
Returned to Sender. The litany of loss.
Grief always just a phone call away.

Walking tonight, arm in arm in
the park we love just before closing
time, shadows are everywhere.
Passing the animal enclosures,
the children’s roundabout and swings,
the spread-eagled oak, we finally reach
the old Victorian bandstand from which,
one glorious summer Sunday, to
our delight, exultant jazz exploded.
‘The Humphrey Lyttelton Band’, a board
announced, and so it was. Applause.

A care-free crowd lined the surrounding
lawn, danced and jived as we so often
had to that same anarchic virtuoso, birds
taking fright as his trumpet soared.

Now, as we skirt the lawn’s damp edge,
silence rules. The desolate bandstand
seems bereft, no trumpet beckons,
no ‘Bad Penny Blues’, no ‘Careless Love’.
Birds eerily line the wooden rails, waiting
for God knows who. Rain and darkness brew.

The landscape changes by the second.

Those musty albums must have lain for years
under the stairs. And what a rum lot of characters
they reveal, posing for eternity. But my,
how they keep their guards up high.

Those starch-collared ancients, were they
ever young I wonder? And those stately ladies
at their sides, with their floor long touch-me-not skirts,
a hidden armoury of armour beneath – were they?
Who can tell. We know them only as Great
Uncle this or Great Aunt that, stern,
forbidding, formal as hell.

Yet think of all the children they begot –
seven, ten, a dozen, even more.
They weren’t brought by the stork I’ll bet.
And consider their names... Max, Amelia,
Manny, Rose, Morris (known as Morrie)
Girtie the Flirty, lovely Harriet.

Go back a little, imagine them human, imagine
them young, in love, cutting a dash, hot,
finding a niche when niches were hard to find
in starch-stiff Victorian England – especially since,
it must be said, mostly they were a foreign lot.

By and large, though, save for a few bad’uns
I could name, their dreams came right just
the same and they could proudly pose for those
puff-chested photographs in black and white.

What though, I wonder, would they say,
seeing us now, long-haired, be-jeaned, dusting
them down, we, the future they made love for,
built for, prayed for – but proud of them all,
come what may, and with them all the way.

for Anthony Harkavy


‘Play me’ invited the piano on
the booming station concourse
and play it with brio the pianist
did, dodging the duff notes:
‘Georgia on my Mind’ as I recall,
which wasn’t on many people’s
that wet Monday morning.

Gradually, improbably,
St Pancras Station had started
to swing, with one couple clinched
in a dance and others gathering
round appreciatively.
A woman with a wobbly
voice began to sing.

Then slowly, as the rhythm
rose and the jazz flowed, six
tall young boys with grey college
scarves edged towards the
piano from the back, laying
careful hands on it in turn
as if the wood they were
touching was holy wood.

When, smiling, they turned away,
the large white hearing aids they
wore came startlingly into view,
and the amazed throng parted
for them like the biblical sea
of old, having witnessed the
surreal scene and understood.

Clearly, those boys had heard a melody
we could not, and suddenly the
station was no longer cold, and there
was more than music in the air.