Stable Node Poem by Keith Shorrocks Johnson

When the phone rings 12-thousand miles away
You don't quite know what to expect
As somebody finally picks up the receiver:
So it was a great relief to know that they
Were all alright and then to find that
Hollies Croft was flush with Aussie visitors -
My niece having come home for a spell from Brizzy
With her daughter Immy who adores England.

I know that feeling so well as you adjust
To the pale-green lens of Constable's pince-nez
And the mizzle-drizzle that makes the oaks bulk out,
Picking up the smell of swaths of new cut grass,
Listening to the song of blackbirds and whoop of the cuckoo -
Everything suffused with a sort of crazy glamour
That comes from an absolute delight in the old ordinary
Suddenly rediscovered from a Rainy-Day Box of Treasures.

While I chatted to my niece, one Antipodean to another,
The conversation rapidly drifted to blackberry and apple pie
Though she had been charged with preparing an Oriental dish
For dinner that involved something or other with coconut vinegar -
But both of us had to set aside memory and reconciliation
As I had to make sure that I asked about her father
Who is a bit middling, knocking on as he is on 83
And who gets a bit bothered one road and another.

John was as well as you could be expected Di assured me
As at first one and then a second grandfather clock
Began to chime eleven o'clock in the morning though it
Was coming to the end of that self-same day in Wellington -
There being two clocks because my sister had inherited
The antique clock left by her grandmother Gladys when she died
And been bequeathed the 'twin' from her mother Meg when she died
Not having the heartlessness to choose between them.

And I knew that in my mind's eye, I could walk away from the oak chest
In the recess where the phone was kept, out through the front door
Onto the sandstone forecourt and be bedazzled by white and red roses
And all manner of wildly thriving plants in-flower from the garden centre,
Looking to where my older boys used to play forts and shops in the hay-bays -
And that, now that the hayshed had been taken down,
If the day had been clearer, I would have been able to catch a glimpse
Of Beeston Crag - as I had from beside my mother's deathbed at Crewe Hospital.

[For when she had been first struck down she had been taken to Leighton
Or what we always knew as Letton - like we knew Cholmondeley
As Chumley and Cholmondeston as Chumston before our betters put us right -
With the new hospital being less than half a mile from Hoolgrave Manor farm
Where my stepfather grew up between Church Minshull and Minshull Vernon.
‘A man who loved the land' as I said in the Foreword to my PhD Thesis
On the Northern Territory Beef Industry - a man of whom our neighbour
Fred Elwood used to say - carrying top-weight with a skin-full after Beeston Auction:

‘Horace - I Iike him'].

And my niece chatted about how it would be lovely to keep the old place on
Though as we were both well aware it was not really ancient
Having been, along with another two fine houses in the terrace,
Constructed in the footprint of farm's old cow sheds or shippons.
Not that it's history of less than thirty years was uneventful
With all manner of family gatherings in grief or celebration
Like my lovely old ‘Wharfedale Terrier' Rangi straining every fibre
To entertain my young sons in a ball-throw even though she was more than past-it.

All of which set me musing on how time can heal and make things right
From what had been a very crimped and damaged family
For my sister and I, what with the loss of our grandfather David in the First War
And the death of our own father Jay in the Royal Air Force in 1943.
I told her how much the house was loved and that it would be classed
By sociologists as a ‘stable node behaviour setting' - but she was off to lay the table
For lunch and when I let slip that one of my poems had been selected
For a 2017 National Anthology she added kindly: ‘if it makes you happy Luv'.