Heaven
Two lean-faced men
With heavy stubble
Shuffle down the road
Mothers warn their children
To keep away.
One man falls down. flat
The other man, white cider on his breath,
Thirty-five, going on seventy, hairless head,
Staggers into the park
He has enough to finish it now.
Acrid smoke, heavy dew,
No teeth, sunken cheek
Clothes found in bins,
Tears salty, stumbling
He sat on the wet bench
Drifts
Into the past.
He’d had a life, his mam,
Their house, on the estate,
Now even my Mary has gone
Children taken away
Job gone.
Weighing things up,
bringing all to mind,
time to come,
seems a waste of breath
float away, with me, my only love,
like beautiful, dead swans.
John Marks
Fri 5th Jun 2020 21:43
Thank you Jennifer. Housing (lack of) and homelessness are terrible problems in the UK. Rip-off landlords love the scarcity of housing, all they want is money. Poor people can so easily lose the tiny bit of security they've managed to find.
“Bleak, dark, and piercing cold, it was a night for the well-housed and fed to draw round the bright fire, and thank God they were at home; and for the homeless starving wretch to lay him down and die. Many hunger-worn outcasts close their eyes in our bare streets at such times, who, let their crimes have been what they may, can hardly open them in a more bitter world.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist