The School Gates

Written by me and included in an anthology called 'The Write Moments' in 1990/91.

She left me at the school gates.
Alone, with a multitude of lost faces
I watched, we watched, as she, they, waved,
and the gates closed like a final sentence.

I, we all, turned to the tarmac wasteland,
precisely traced  with circuits of white paint.
Our new parent, hovering, twittering,
bird-like behind immense round spectacles,
gathered us up in her nestling embrace,
trapping our backward glance.

We became a form, as the minutes tumbled by,
of black and blonde, and brown and blue.
Wellies, coats, bags, hooks marked with duck-shaped
stickers, and words,
our names gloriously written in rainbow crayons.

She was forgotten, our home maker.
She did not enter our minds,
was pushed out by new textures, new tastes.
She was not now, but later,
when we charged into the afternoon.
She was waiting where we had left her,
or she had left us,
by the school gates.