A 1950S SORT OF DAY

This Wednesday I had a surfeit of poetry. I spent the afternoon with the Secret Poets offering and receiving constructive feedback and, although I had forgotten he was coming, the evening with Paul Mortimer doing more of the same. 
With due thanks to everyone I offer you a poem about my grandmother. It was inspired by a photograph I found in a pile of papers and which have managed to mislay again.
That's consistency for you.

Grandma Hanley

She sits black and white,

as stern as history,

centre of the photograph.

Square black shoes.

Polished of course.

At her waist the deaf aid

that whistled it's way through my childhood.

About my age now,

after a life so much harder then mine,

she faced the lens.

Photography must have been

a more serious business back then,

I can't align this image with my memories of her.

Perhaps it was a 1950s type of day,

when the past sat heavy on her shoulders,

with a weight that was too much.

She shrank as I grew,

her mind slowly left her body behind,

to wind down in its own time.

These two photographs capture her better.
Me and Paul were talking about slang and looking through some slang dictionaries. He delighted in the phrase: "hotter than a two dollar pistol" but I'm ashamed to say I have beaten him to the draw in using it.

We are talking about Jim Thompson,

how he's hotter than a two dollar pistol,

and just as valued by the literary elite.

Then I go upstairs to find his book to lend you.

I've always tended to leave

whatever I used to mark my place inside the book,

and out of its pages flutter two thick, blue tickets:

David Bowie, Cardiff Arms Park.

So that's the memento and this is the memory:

it was a Sunday in June thirty years ago,

I went with Christine, before we had the kids.

She'd never seen him and oh, how we danced. 

And that was how it happened, and here are the tickets.

I suppose I should end with a Bowie song so here is Let's Dance.

Until next time.