This rainy windy night I remember stars
and waiting at the bus stop on the dark lane
where nothing would pass except the bus
and no one would walk the cracked pavement
that led up the hill and across the moor.
The sky was always bright those nights
and the rare streetlamps ghostly white.
I was a child then and the monsters in the shadows
were ones I no longer recognise,
the trees wailed a different story,
and the lane and the bus ran down to a town
that has changed like a facelift changes and tightens
familiar loose features, obliterates the past
that peered from the creases.
This cloud and this rain that pelts the windows now
remind me of those nights, frost-bright and clear,
silent as countryside is silent,
and the child that I was then,
waiting for the bus that ran and ran
and never came back.