JOHN GREY

Local History      

The houses on this street
wear modest plaques
screwed into woodwork,
honoring Tobias, Nathaniel,
folk who cured colds, stitched trousers,
raised sons who went to war.
There's no history of kings or beheadings,
no saber clash, no coronation gowns.
Just timbered dwellings 
with tilted roofs and friendly doors,
all built by hand.

As a boy, I fed on great names –
Napoleon, Henry VIII –
the kind that thundered from a teacher's tongue.
But no textbook mentioned Mrs. Ellis,
knitting on her veranda
with one-eyed terrier lazing at her feet.

There's a second history here,
one the books forgot to write,
laid out in laundry lines,
in cracked garden gnomes,
in a gate half off its hinges.

You don't read this history.
You live in it. You wave to it.
You hear it creaking softly
from a porch just down the road.

 

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