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.
© Graham R Sherwood 03/2019
