So much of the writing of poetry involves me, I find, in a trek backwards into my past. It’s as if I’m trying somehow to account for those moments of epiphany or trauma, setting the dreamlike recollection of them against my understanding of the present. Maybe the poems decode those signals from times past in some way. Maybe they merely rearrange the data, like notes in a scale: a different tune from the same base elements.
Those fumes from the past are often the most potent in the form of images, not words. In the same way that the tritest of tunes can reconstruct instantly a three-dimensional sense of place & time, so the most banal of visual images can bring whirling back the sense of a world long past.
In days long before kindergarten-size Nike trainers or Converse baseball boots we all wore Start-rite sandals. With their crepe soles & their stencilled leaf patterns on the uppers, they were unisex & irredeemably juvenile. Wearing them, it was entirely impossible to present yourself to the world as anything other than a Child.
I shall always associate Start-rite shoes with rationing, trams, short-back-&-sides haircuts, bombsites, a glass of orange juice & an arrowroot biscuit outside the pub on a Saturday morning just before lunch.
And also with hope for a better world in a time of exhaustion & decay…
VANISHING POINT
Those Start-rite kids.
A tam o’ shantered boy,
a bobble-hatted girl,
both austerity shod
and utility wrapped
against the winter
of the world.
I used to wonder
where they were going.
Somewhere far away,
so swaddled and determined.
I bet they had their gloves
on long elastic through
each sleeve. I bet they had
their Chilprufe vests, their Aertex
shirts buttoned up across
their breakfasts. Bet they had
hope in their hearts, dreams
unconsumed by fire or water,
as each set sensible foot
on the long, straight highway.
So much is promised us
in a hurting world between here
and the vanishing point
12:09:08 AM 
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