Mikaela Castledine #269 I am not sad

(On preparing the old family home for sale)

No I am not sad

memories are not held here

only those places that you left

cleaved cleanly

cut and polished to reveal

your childhood caught midspin in amber

have the referring pain of nostalgia

I lived fifteen years in this house but then

they stayed on another nearly thirty

so all the overlay is old

flaked and blistering

and I spent too many hours here latterly

in the binding of my mother’s illness

There are things that I could be sad at

if I lost my father to this house

to the sliprot of its untended wood

to the cosh of stairs edges

to the chill of ghosts and shadow

I could be sad at the enormity

of neglect and dereliction

the repair of which none of us has the appetite for

I could be sad

for sheer volumes of air unbreathed

by one man who cannot spread his living

into so many rooms

children are needed here and singing

and the happy satisfaction of muscle and will

No I am not sad

at the disappointment of old neighbours

whose own skittling over steps

and bonebreaking

in their own driveways

of their own old large houses

has not struck sense into them

who don't wish to be treated as children

but nevertheless duck behind skirts

away from the fear of change

forgetting how they once bravely bore

such hardships dislocations and loss

or thinking that like a pension earnt

from a lifetime paying

past bravery should somehow reward them now

and insulate from further difficulty

when the truth as we can all see is

that courage in the past is always only rehearsal

for what will be needed at the end

No I am not sad

at finding light and well built spaces

to cheer and uncurl my father in unaccustomed warmth

from dejected contemplation of the end of times

and neither am I sad but angry

at the casting role of mostly daughters

who are made to push and pull

their unwilling aging parents

out of their ill fitting shells

when they know they must

and are called bossy for it

No I am not sad but sorry for the sadness of others

those who would rather wish to die

than move house

the stress of which has been somewhat overblown

and who would rather leave the culling of their lifetimes treasures

to their children in their grief

than help them do it with laughing and stories

I am not sad but happy at the hopeful unrolling of tentative plans

at another cheerful decade or more of my father's company

at sensible planning and good fortune

and I will not be sad but happy

to drive past this well known corner

and see someone's children

playing complicated games of tag

around the boles of long remembered trees