Valediction

(On hearing that my old school is being pulled down after 93 years.)

They’re demolishing my old school without asking,
the classrooms have been emptied for the last time,
but the sorrow of their emptiness will hang around,
the way the smell of cleanliness at the start of term
hurts like a new beginning in the pit of the stomach.
Boys will think on the times when they returned:
the painful rush of memories at an old desk,
images of former selves, the gauntlet of corridors.

What’s left for survival’s indeterminate compromise
but a poor elsewhere for reflection on those they knew
and didn’t know who went off to die in war or life?

Even the nothingness that remains of what
was lived and learnt is being obliterated:

soon there will be no grave at which to mourn.