Reunion

There are no shrieks of recognition.
Skiddaw outside the window is the least changed
though it changed with the weather then.

Gradually the faces fit the names;
last seen on the brink of womanhood,
the bodies never could.

Voices are the key:
timbre, intonation and rhythm are the same,
if accents have softened.

No one is famous or rich.
Most seem content. One has got religion.
Several always had it.

Talk is of our children’s lives
as if ours are no longer relevant,
as if we’ve stood aside.

Fifties girls in our fifties,
we have sedate lives and sedate bodies.
All tumult is past or ahead.

We pass round photographs
of ourselves then; eager, good girls
who wrote home regularly.

We remember the clothes we wore,
the way we did our hair, the boys we knew,
and absent friends.

As talk, dinner, wine and time
pass,  the years reverse and redisclose
the dreamer, the wit, the swot.

We become the girls we were
and are shocked at sight of the old men
who arrive to drive us home.

Alice Harrison is a retired teacher living in Rhyl. She began writing seriously when she joined the Open University Poets in 1992. Her poems have appeared in several magazines.