Return

Travel West. Submerge yourself
in the M4’s homeward drift.

Remember how
its nightly glow

bewitched the kid
at your bedroom window?

It looked like fire, didn’t it?
Exit at junction 34.

Drop into street view
Follow the lane

down past prickly fields
where swallows zip.

Remember those kids
pulling petals

from clover heads?
Sucking sugar

from each wet tip?
Close your bedroom door.

Listen for tawny owls
and the InterCity.

Watch pipistrelles twist
in the velvet night

like you used to.
As they always did.

You remember, don’t you?
You remember everything.

 

Tamara Evans’s poems have been published in Poetry Wales and in the Write Out Loud Milestones anthology, and selected to appear on buses in London and Brighton in Poetry on the Buses competitions. Find Tamara on bluesky, instagram.