Transformation

A warm summer’s evening,
the kind of day when
bedtime forgets it’s name and
little ones refuse to tell.

You wore a denim shirt
tucked in, but not quite,
to your trendy knee length shorts
like a cool teenager.
You were chasing a balloon
with your big brother.

When did you stop being a baby?

Was it one night last week
while you were sleeping?
A mysterious unfolding,
a sudden beating of wings,
a flying off into the unknown,
into the boundless landscape of
your very own pure and precious ife.

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Sunday mornings

Chapel was compulsory
in our household
unless you were nearly dead
which was how I often felt
after Saturday night
at the youth club
or to be more precise
The Red Lion Pub.

If you don’t come then
you’ll peel all the vegetables
for dinner –
difficult choice.

God didn’t approve of jeans either
unless you were catholic,
then he didn’t mind one way or another.
But we were Methodist to the core;
a weekly dose of pleated obedience –
below the knee.

Arrows of hell fire and damnation
fired from the pulpit
aimed solely at me
because I was the one
who didn’t want to be there
and God knew it;
I was marked down in his
little book of badness every week.

But even if God hated me
attendance was rewarded;
one more reprieve
for that day at least
from the ever increasing
slipperiness of the slope
I was now on, heading toward
parental shaking of heads
and the shameful label of
“bitter disappointment”
which was the last thing in the world
I would ever want to be
because that would mean
I had failed.