gimme shelter

tangling ivy and bramble branches

throttle my back garden

and buried in the far corner

is the air-raid shelter

my grandparents used

to save themselves,

and my mother

(and me by default - I wasn't born yet)

from stick bombs of the Luftwaffe

 

the walls are four bricks thick

its roof is nine inch concrete

(reinforced) and there’s a nifty

boarded up escape hatch at the back

 

it’s had its uses over-time

it’s been a hen house, wood store,

sweat lodge, bijou cafe,

but the overgrowth of

undergrowth defeated me

and I let nature take its course

(or was that a lie I told myself?)

 

last week,

impelled by an urgency,

I set about reclaiming it

with thorn prick curses

and brand new machete

 

I slashed a pathway to the door

(still painted black - disintegrating)

and flashed a torch inside

 

a stove was there,

intact from over thirty years,

two chairs and a table set

two dinner plates, knives and forks

two wine glasses (a bottle smashed)

a single dessicated rose

in a black mould vase

and a Valentine card

 

I’d overplayed my hand

one misty evening,

mid-February nineteen ninety,

I proposed to Bethany

but Beth shook her head, said,

she could do much better than me

 

my ‘sorry sorry sorry’

(for god knows what)

echoed hollow after her -

and thirty years later

reverberated

 

I slammed the black door

to the oubliette

but too late –

that clutch of memories

had broken free