Only there, the afternoons could suddenly pause
and when I looked up from lacing my shoe
a long road held no one, the gardens were empty,
an ice-cream van chimed and dwindled away.
On the motorway bridge, I waved at the windscreens
oddly hurt by the blurred waves back, the speed.
So I let a horse in the noisy field sponge at my palm
and invented, in colour, a vivid lie for us both.
In a cul-de-sac a strange boy threw a stone.
I crawled through a hedge into long grass
at the edge of a small wood, lonely and thrilled.
The green silence gulped once and swallowed me whole.
The cul-de-sac could be the limited scope of childhood and she passes this rapidly. The “strange boy” with the stone is open to interpretation. There is a suggestion of indifference; that the speaker is uninterested in the game of throwing or the boy. However, this could also imply an act of violence; the danger involved in the future world.
Stafford Afternoons