Expanding Worlds

My mother sang her babe to sleep,

firelight swaying on the ceiling, warm

shadows darkening a canopy of love.

Dismay propelled me to the window.

Outside, leaves were breaking green.

The front hedge held a nest

that cradled robin’s five blue eggs.

Nose pressed to pane, my breath fogged up the glass.

But then we moved, from here to there,

from one place to another. Journeys meant

distended hours in crowded trains

rattling through dim countryside

to strange locations, separate and haphazard.

But one day, we settled and the map of growing up

coalesced into coherence. The house we lived in

grew antennae; we knew the way to school,

to Grandma’s where we went to live when she was

taken ill and she and Grandpa needed to be cared for.

New trails were printed on our mental map.

Hesitant at first in unfamiliar terrain, we became

explorers, tiptoeing in the park, past the old fountain

dripping water and brass cups from shabby curlicues;

running through gardens, where two ancients

tended beds and beds of dahlias, bloody scarlet,

shocking orange, pale lurid eruptions of violence,

primly penned in dwarf hedges of box; while Grandpa

lingered, we rushed headlong to a wilder path

around the reservoir, its banks still blotched

with purple daisies and browning golden rod.

And so to the highest hill, where we could see

our neighbourhood bleeding into

the city down below, all the way

to the harbour and the sea.

The edge of a new world;

the road to the future.

Felicity Sidnell Reid

Barnes & Noble

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