Change

Change is the only constant.

Change is inevitable.

Change is the river that stays in the same place

while never being of the same water.

​It starts in the way a child’s new shoes soon pinch their feet,

it is the soft face 

sharpening into rugged mountains of grown-up choices,

decisions to be made

or flights to book and pay for.

We go to sleep in a warm

soft 

comfy bed

provided by our loving parents

and wake up as a adult

with responsibilities,

commitments 

and with sheets to wash and beds to make

wondering where the hell the magic of 'make-believe' went.

​Change is our shifting skylines.

​Cities like a slow-motion earthquakes,

are distroyed and rebuilt.

The friendly corner shop where you bought sweets

is now an international chain-store

a steel and glass tower 

reaching for the sky

brick is the ghost of our neighbourhoods 

their whispers heard under the hum of the trains on the newly built railway.

Lifes map in our heads is always five years behind the reality.

The fields of five years ago

are now the housing estates of today.

​Hear the quiet rustle of a page 

from the history books

turned in a library

telling stories of power

power moving like a tide,

rushing in

then falling back to reveal the wreckage of what was,

rushing in to drown the old statues we knew and  respected.

What was once,

is now a memory.

What was once whispered in the street,

is now the anthem of the time.

​How do we prevent change?

We can't!

We can try to grab hold of dry sand,

but soon learn - for the secret is in the leaning

and we deal with it by building bridges out of the bomb site that was the past,

by the plants growing in the cracks of the recently laid concrete,

and by learning that the heart

is the only thing,

fragile enough

emotional enough - yet flexible enough 

...to survive it all.

​Change can feel overwhelming - or beautiful,

depending on how you look at it.