Tuesday Poem: "House of the Forgotten"

Like time travellers,

we arrived at the boarding house,

rare in our youth and togetherness.

Behind the brave smile

of the white, wooden facade

the men lived like mementoes

in sad, concrete shoeboxes.

It was the nadir of winter

and shadows seeped through the courtyard,

squeezing old lungs with icy fingers

until they wheezed like defective accordions.

In the drab lounge room

television held out its flickering promises to them

as they sat on musty furniture in mustier suits.

The kerosene heater could not dispel

the coldness of their hope.

At six o’clock, we assembled

in the ’50s functional ugliness dining room

where they used the arctic cutlery

to cut each other down to size.

The car accident man whose disfigured face

was reduced to spouting clichés,

the man whose heart was devoured by the bottle,

the man who walked miles every day

but had nowhere to go,

the man whose wife had turned him out

for fear of catching his self-pity

and the friendless young man

who had never learnt to listen.

It seemed almost sinful

to look forward

to the European summer

when some of these men

would die forgotten

in the Australian winter.

POET'S NOTE: This winter has seemed a particularly cold one and some of you may have read about the accommodation crisis in Christchurch that Gerry Brownlee denies we are having. However, there are people living in cars or in substandard housing for whom the winter is a brutal ordeal.

Recently, the single men who lived in the blocks of council flats over our back fence made the front page of The Press because they were given only five days to vacate the complex because the city council deemed it unsafe due to earthquake damage. Some of them had lived there for many years.

These things reminded me of a poem I had written years ago when my first wife and I stayed in a boarding house for a couple of weeks between our rental lease expiring and our departure for Europe.

The poet wishes to acknowledge The Press in whose pages this poem appeared.