Photo by Abbilyn Rurenko on Unsplash

They called me Win,
but they didn’t notice me.
Mostly I felt as though I melted into the fog,
did it really matter that I loved wearing grey?
My pinafores were always bright and cheery.

I walked the village eighty years and more,
smiled at them, admired their children and their dogs,
and their gardens.
My garden was pretty too, but they never said a word.

Until the bomb fell, without exploding,
lying silent among my primrose and Sweet Betty.
Then they all came in, talking and walking around
as though they owned the place.
The soldiers came and sent them away,
told me to move my brother in his bath chair,
mother from her bed, where she’d lain for twenty years.

Where could I take them, only one place I knew,
a small house, smaller than mine, stuffed with people.
But they took us in, all of us, kept us warm, made us smile.
The dear old man, he made it a parade, and the village men helped us just to please him.
Pushed my brother’s bath chair, lifted mother into her carriage –
the dear old man’s wheelbarrow.

She insisted on her lacy pillows and shawls,
creamy as I kept them, underneath her.
She small as a doll, riding as grand as the old Queen,
her guardsman being the menfolk, one on each side lest the barrow tip.
Down the road we went, them fussing over her,
and no one noticed me.

That was long ago,
now here I lie,
the people that I knew, grew old with, smiled at, lie around me,
their family folk walk around my grave to throw the faded flowers away,
on the compost heap nearby,
as they change the arrangements on their loved ones’ graves,
they murmur and they tend things carefully,
grass grows long and untidy over me,
but no one notices me.