I’ve mentioned poetry quite a bit in each of my monthly Hello Good-bye posts, but I rarely share any of my poems. So, I’ll try to fix that between now and the end of the year. This is a poem I wrote in August.

I have a tendency to get a line of a song or a word stuck in my head, or something I read online that I like, and as thoughts surround it, it turns into a story or a character, or in this case, a poem.

The first 3 lines of this poem were part of a memorial I read on Facebook that someone had written about a friend of theirs who died of AIDS years ago and he told a story about how they’d grown up together in a small town.

That resonated with me and my own “back home”  and my best friend I had back then so I wrote a poem about it.

Your House
August 30, 2019

When I go back home
It’s memory I seek
And unfinished business

Old houses, old haunts
Lost on streets I once knew
Like the voice of my parents

Turn off East Main,
Onto Shady Lane
There it is, mellowed with age

And the lives exhaled there
Your parakeet buried out back
With the other songs of our youth

Dirty mags under your bed
My mom found them stolen
And stashed under mine

I never said good-byes out loud
Did you say yours?
Or did you just grow up

Packed a bag and left
Like I did before you
We never want to say good-bye

To Shady Lane
To your old house
And to mine.