24 September 2021: Observations

Small Town Saturday

It’s market day and
your name is Pat and
standing beside you
is your brother, Jack,

well he might’ve been your brother
if your mum had married the first boy
she kissed but there is some blood
connection somewhere under our skin,

           and Jack pulls
a harvest landscape
of corn in a crate from
under the trestle table,
sets it to the side as if
it’s probably but not really
for sale, or possibly

something special he’s
keeping for his granny
who stops by at 10 o’clock
on Saturday to haggle
the price of one tomato
or one spring onion,

and just as I’m about to ask him
why he’s set the corn aside,

there goes Dad in one
of his look away moods,
walking by with a face
like a hard horizon with
a big wrench in his
greasy clenched hand.

Image is from Unsplash. Shared with @Experimentsinfc #APoemADay on Twitter   ©Misky 2021

10 responses to “24 September 2021: Observations”

  1. that took me back to where I grew up!

    It wasn’t a small town, but parochial nonetheless.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. I love a farmers’ market, and they’re positively fun at this time of year. Everyone’s slightly grumpy and everything is half spent. Glad it took you back, Mr B.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. We used to go up to Winchester.
        The problem was that although the food was better, it wasn’t cheaper. And we still had to face a supermarket trip afterwards to get “everything else”.
        But your poem made me think of Liverpool, where I was brought up. So-and-so almost being such and such, etc. It was very insular and a lot of people never left.

        Like

        1. It’s like this in my neighbourhood also. Everyone of us have lived in this close for at least 30-years, raised their kids who’ve now had their own kids, who bring their grandkids to visit, and we oldies are all retired. We’re like mushrooms who refuse to move. 😂

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Was exactly like that here. But of six houses we’ve has 2 new families in the last year. Probably, before then, we were the last people in, 20y ago. But it is surprising how little we all know each other.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. We all know each other well, without it being too well. We take in each other’s packages, checking if all’s okay during Covid or bad weather or illness, and have an annual drinks dooo at Christmas (a different house each year ). It’s nice.

              Liked by 1 person

  2. Thank you for feeding my people-watching addiction this morning, M. Very cool capture.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. You give a whole new meaning to being ‘in the market for a partner!’

    Liked by 1 person

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Blog at WordPress.com.

%d bloggers like this: