Writing: George Millership
Illustration: Petra Wonham
For many of us, part of beginning a university education is leaving home. This poem combines the heartache of leaving home with a grown-up take on one of the first tasks we are given in primary school - drawing your house. More of George Millership’s poetry can be found at thenotesonmyphone.wordpress.com
I drew my house
from memory
From my flat
a year away.
I shaded the dint I made courtesy of my cricket bat
The magnolia tree, but with the branch I broke,
And all the other things hidden from mum and dad.
I drew my sister at seven in her tutu and wellies
And the step on which I inaugurated her with an autumn broom
I drew the front window, complete with the old telly
Outlined the ivy dad tore down that dappled my childhood room.
The garden gate was easy, persistent in its flimsy state
As was the sloping path, which when frosty we'd unintentionally skate
Here were the holly bushes, which in winter pricked bright red
Even under biro blue, I felt the place where I first bled.
On the pavement I HB-ed the hopscotch, which was once charted in chalk
And behind, the front porch, where we'd drip sticky ice and talk
My bedroom to which I retreated when voice clumsily dropped
And finally the front door I stepped out of with my bags, an offer, the lot.
In the absence of a façaded photo, I worked up each scruffy layer
Of recollections rendered roughly on lined and margined paper
And though my home never looked all at once like that,
For me it was certainty, actuality,
For me it was fact.