ALLOTMENT

The Allotment gardens are where
I hear old men laugh together, the unfamiliar
sounds that spray plots with surprise and delight,
around borders beneath the ambience of birdsong,
across barking strimmers, flowerpots, rolls of mowers
and polyglot tongues.
Marco’s cadenza sprinkles his pea netting,
‘When you comma for picka only here todai?’
His laugh-mate on the bicycle replies,
‘I soon come back to finish de shed’
He is creating a verandah, Caribbean style.
As the school bell rings over the road,
against the flap and squawk of signets,
Victor, the Polish war veteran,
smiles at our Mares Tails,
‘I’m 92 years old, older yet than them.’
His plot if a mystery of plants corralled in
the sun-has-never-met greenhouse,
from where, outside, he regales his neighbour.

And Joe who has waited, for more than laughter,
to recite his,
‘Autobiography Of A Welsh Childhood Down the Mines’,
roots the unwary,
while the wiser drift away
to chortle on the far side of spinach patches
as they haul recycled sheds
from plot to slab to slab on plot.