Time Share (Poetry)

Sunday morning and they’re waiting
by the window, in the doorway,
overcoated, gloved and hatted,
clutching handbags, sticks and frames,
and as cars pull up they’re waving
as they shuffle slowly forward
to be claimed by sons and daughters,
ushered into backs of Rovers,
Ford Mondeos, Vauxhall Astras,
wedged between the still-warm golf clubs
and the family retriever
moulting tufts of golden fur.

Off to church and Sunday dinner —
change of scenery and faces,
buckled in, resigned to fussing —
it’s the highspot of their week;
while the world goes on without them,
shunts them back and forth to schedule,
human parcels labelled fragile,
precious for their memories;
wheeled out in best bib and tucker,
they’re no trouble for an hour,
and, odds on, we’ll all go ga-ga
when it’s our turn to be old.

Like geriatric Cinderellas
in their coaches before midnight,
they’ll return bemused and weary
to their modest sheltered homes,
and the tales that they’ve been telling
of the war and vanished heydays
fade to twilight in the evening
as their lives are burning low,
and their sons and grandsons leave them
to the warden’s tender mercies
’til next Sunday or another
when there’s time enough to care.