Is this really the house?
Number Eighteen, it says on the door.
Has the house shrunk in the rain, like wool?
Or have I grown too big,
Like Alice, drinking and eating
Till my head won’t fit through the door?
I knew change had come
When I entered the street,
Because all the cobbles had gone.
But yes, this is the house,
It has not moved
In forty years; it stands,
Common sense tells me, unchanged.
Inside, it has a child
Hidden away, but blissfully so.
A brother, a mother and father
Still eat together at Sunday lunch,
With the wireless tuned to Radio Two,
Playing songs from before I was born.
Our cat sits on the windowsill,
Waiting to be let in.
Betsy the car sits out front,
A big black tank of a car.
I wonder if the stairs still creak,
If the cellar stinks of damp,
If the woodchip paper covers the walls.
How I want to go in,
But the past is locked inside.
The door will not let me pass.
It is a new door,
White, when ours was green.
It closes my wondering down.
This is just a house now.
Someone else’s home.
Howard Benn