Team Talk

Of course, I recognised them immediately.

It may have been full fifty years, but

behind each lined face still stood the boy,

boys’ faces, which had become grandfathers’ faces

experienced, damaged, both wise and rueful, but

still boys’ faces after all this time.

Wide greeting smiles reminiscent of those damp

Saturday mornings down the park

and the realisation that with my arrival

there would at last be enough for a team,

the match could begin full strength.

We embraced, warm handshakes and shoulder patting

that we would have been too self-conscious

to have performed in our youth,

pints ordered, seats taken, keeping eye contact

each thinking ‘Is this really happening”.

And we’re off, as if fifty years had been but a week.

girls, music, football, teachers, homes lived in,

when and where, who and what,

births celebrated, deaths mourned

there had to be some, of course.

Pulsing through it all, sheer delight

that three of us had survived, each

now in our late-sixties,

with different stories to tell

worlds apart from those childhood times

when we all had the same things,

same houses, same food, same lives

and nothing mattered more than

Saturday mornings and the making of a team.

Published by grahamrsherwood