The final poem this month from ‘Dancing in the Rain’
Chapel was compulsory
in our household,
unless you were almost 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”
And God didn’t approve of jeans either
unless you were catholic
then he didn’t mind one way or the other.
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
book of badness every week
But even if God hated me
attendance was rewarded;
one more reprieve
from the ever increasing
slipperiness of
the slope I was now on
heading swiftly 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
journeyintopoetry 