TIME TRAVEL

I'd love to travel back:

feel the sweet warmth of mints

inside my mouth in 1890,

lick Victorian ice-cream,

follow that monochrome lad

who just slipped round the corner

into the rest of his life.

 

Granddad when an urchin

stole rides, he said, just clinging

to a horse-drawn carriage

then after smashing windows

police rang the doorbell at night;

blue pills they dished to anyone sick

when later a corporal in the war.

 

So thank you, early pioneers

for the bemused folk crowding the lense,

staring at us through portals of time

but unable to communicate,

oblivious to sufferings ahead

with no idea we'd understand it all.

 

The Lake, August 2020, Editor John Murphy.