Doesn't have one (Archived)

The past -
Running down the numerous corridors
sitting on the garden wall
remembering what happened to Humpty Dumpty
Taunting the boy ‘you can't follow me up here’
But then he can climb trees and she is not allowed when she’s wearing her best dress and she could scrape her knees.
Now those years have past.
She can't run down these corridors
Can’t make it around the house
To count how many rooms
Confined in this chair
Looking out of the window
At the lawns. Where she had once sat when she was younger, making daisy chains
Now she watches the grandchildren play
They watch amusing cartoons on a rainy day
Television rots your brains
The zombies walking on this earth these days prove that.
when she was a girl...
Didn’t have them.
Her hair in pigtails
Country lanes on a bicycle her path to school
Kisses and cigarettes in the drawing room.
Picnics and being introduced to suitable, highly respectable men.
Riding her pony.
Not going to school but hiding in the bushes and the flowerbeds.
Avoiding Father in one of his intolerable rages.
Talking to the servants.
Fingerprints on a freshly polished candle stick.
Getting measured for a new dress with mother.
Skipping games with her friends.
Sitting in this chair seventy years later.
Tapping on the window with her walking stick, waving to the children.
How did she get this way?
So lazy.
Throwing aside the blanket, getting to her feet and walking down the stairs. Tremors in her hands and feet.
Her daughter busy in the kitchen to see-
She makes a dash to the garden.
Bright sun and leaves falling from the trees.
She can sit outside here.
And she needs to.
The stairs have taken her breath.
She leans on her stick, walking forward. She doesn’t want to worry the children.
She is OK, does not need to be in that chair. That steel trap.
How is being old a disease?
She sits on the mat with the children coming to sit with her.
She encouraged them to go and play.
She likes to see them so happy, like she had been when she was a girl and it is the same house still.