Where the cart piled with sacks

shirehorse pulled

its bit held onto by the dark dust faced coalman

used to to rumble down

 

those cobbled streets

were hives of neighbourly activity

 

for my grandmother tells me

that those face to face crumbling house doors

( demolition doomed )

were in her time always open to one and all

 

until some of those houses

became lived in by the mourning wife

of a once fine strong soldiering man

 

there were in the Kitchener era

many fine strong soldiering men who

once he had patriotically patronised them off

to Flanders fields

gave no other thoughts about them

but

we remember!