Are we nearly there yet? & House
by Aoife Mannix
[ poetry - march 08 ]
Are we nearly there yet?
On the train the man across from me
is talking to his two little girls.
The smaller one, so small she fits
snugly against the window frame,
is counting how many stops there are to go.
Her older sister corrects her with the superiority
of those for whom counting is no longer a wonder.
They are about to argue,
when their father says don't worry about it,
the stops are always changing,
but I'll tell you when we get there, it's not so far now.
And I think of my father,
on long summer drives across the west of Ireland,
with the light fading and the green brokenness of the land.
That time we saw the truck overturn in a huge orange ball,
and though we begged him to pull over
so we could gasp at the flames,
he refused, saying it's not our destination,
some things you don't yet need to see,
and he kept on driving us all the way home.
House
There is of course the reality of rooms,
furniture, bookshelves,
which corner to put the television in,
but this is only stuff.
And stuff breaks or rots
or goes out of fashion.
It's not the essence of a home,
which to me has always meant
an easiness of being.
A space free of petty grudges.
A shelter from the harshness
of the outside world
with its traffic jams and jealousies
and nibbling treachery.
A kind of refuge from the claustrophobia
of other people and their judgements.
A bubble of sanity where we can
sprawl upon the sofa,
tell each other silly stories, stupid jokes,
the secrets we never even knew we had.
Where I can be me and you can be you,
and the rest is only decoration.
