Across the street, the hoarding
Offensive, obscures the garden
Proclaims its melancholy message
FRONT UNIT FOR SALE: large, spacious
Desirable, much sought after.
Extravagant pleonastic hyperbole
Of the unreal estate agent.
This was her home. Mary, Maria,
Marushka? We never learned her name;
Seeing her often in her garden,
The desirable spacious garden
Of the salesman's rodomontade.
But really, in plain English
Just a patch of well loved loam.
Sitting on a stool, bent with arthritis
And the aches and paints that older flesh
Is heir to. But need not be. And we would stay
And pass the time of day And comment on the weather
And watch the seasons in the changing beds
Bulbs and annuals and leafy flowering shrubs
Freesias and jonquils, marigolds, stock, petunias
And when our children and their children came
She'd hand out lollies, her own, prospering
She said, in New York, London, Rome or some such place.
There came a time when even these small pleasures
Were denied her; and so she went. No doubt
To be well cared for and nursed and cosseted.
And now the hoarding obscures the garden
And who will nurse and care and cosset it.
John Braham 1992