Mildred’s Window

It is all softer now,
down Mildred Carter’s lane.
Not quiet, no, never quiet,
just worn thin with endless rain.
Her kettle ticks like an old dog’s heart,
steady, stubborn, slow.
And Mildred sits by the window ledge
watching a world she used to know.

She’s lived here since girlhood,
when the ginnels were full of shouts,
and Mrs Finch from number seven
would boss everyone about.
Mildred still mutters when she passes,
old habits don’t quite die,
“Oh there she goes, the queen of the street,
nose stuck halfway to the sky.”

Her own house, once butter-yellow,
is flaking at the eaves.
She keeps meaning to paint it,
but never quite believes
there’s any point in polishing
what time is set to keep.
So she simply dusts the mantel,
and sends her memories back to sleep.

She sips her tea with trembling hands,
milk this time, two drops,
and thinks of days before her heart
got chipped in little chops.
The day her son went running
down to the old canal,
and how the telegram followed
like a shadow at her back.
“I always knew,” she whispers,
“the golden days would end.”
Since that morning she’s carried grief
the way others carry friends.

Number two is sagging now,
its roofline bowed with years.
She tells herself she’ll fix it,
but the truth stands bright and clear,
some things decline no matter
how firm our hands may stay.
Some doors won’t open ever again
however much we pray.

Across the lane, the chapel bells
still ding their thin old tune.
But fewer feet go shuffling in,
and fewer still at noon.
She watches McGonagall shuffle past,
a tin of peas in hand,
“Still feeding ghosts their supper, dear?
Still running the whole damned land?”

They were friends once, long ago,
when the village children roared,
when Mildred stitched her wedding dress
and McGonagall lent a board
to hammer out the hemline,
straight and strong and proud,
before Reg went cold beneath the birch
and the world grew far too loud.

There’s gossip still, in scraps and threads,
though the voices now are thin,
Ethel muttering at number five,
and the Peaks who “moved” but didn’t.
Mildred hears them sometimes,
as she folds her washing neat:
“Do you remember the Smiths?” one says,
“Or how the feud began, way back, in that nearby street?”

At night she sits with slippers on,
counting years like beads.
She pretends she doesn’t notice
how the town no longer breathes.
But when dawn breaks pale and early,
she steps outside the door,
and feels the village sighing
in her bones forevermore.

So let the days lean forward,
and let the years recline.
Mildred’s window keeps it all,
the laughter, loss, and lines
of a place that’s slowly slipping
back into the clay.
Still she holds it, thread by thread,
in her quiet, stubborn way.

And when they speak of this place
long after Mildred passes through,
they’ll say the village lived its last
through Mildred’s curtain view.

• Jay Rose Ana
  (a partner piece to McGonagall’s Eyes)