I was thinking on awakening this morning of stories in my first published book—stories of home and among them the poetry that spoke of those places.
We had an attic—which many older houses do—a space at the top of the house where things to go to sit awhile or be stored. For some items, not the best place but out of the way of a busy family and all its related belongings and conundrums.
My sisters and I went up there to play the old phonograph, dress up in old clothes, sort through old school papers that became yellowed and brittle in time in that warm place. Where we could look out to the road and over the fields at our farm. This was a place we retreated to now and then for short periods of time.
The poem came much later as an adult looking back and no longer living there. And now our home belongs to someone else. But in memory, it’s still ours.
 

Attic Playhouse

Under the roof is a playhouse
with its familiar odour of heat and yesterday

leather skates lean against each other
like fallen dominoes
March through December
 
outgrown Sunday shoes wait for the next pair of feet
castoff clothes crammed in a crumbling cardboard box
yellowed notebooks   -lined with ancient scribbles
 
crank the gramophone
inside its heat blistered  black box
 
it warbles a tune
in symphony with buzzing flies
hypnotized by the light of one window
and too dazed to find another exit
 
 
© Carolyn Wilker
published in Once Upon a Sandbox, 2011