Victoria Broome 2013

Mum it’s nearly spring,
on Ferry Road in Woolston
the blossoms are beginning,
on the streets near me magnolia
stellata has burst open.

I imagine you might be
a young child again tonight,
there is a slip of a new moon
for you to skip over, and there
is your father’s Four Square shop

on Ferry Road all these years later;
he is gone and your mother and
brother and the cathedral and
the convent of the nuns of the
Community of the Sacred Name.

The Four Square shop remains
and the house on Barrington Street
and St Nicholas church where
you were to be married in 1954 and
from where you will leave for the last time.

Like the iconic painting
of the Four Square man with his wide smile
we let the past come and go, it’s cartoon
promise, its nostalgia, when life was clearly
black and white and everything would be alright.