‘Agnes’
© Joe Canning 2016. All Rights Reserved.

I courted lovely Agnes whenever I was young,
long years before these wrinkles creased my brow.
Her hair black as feathers on a raven’s royal breast;
fell sometimes o’er those dark enchanting eyes.

A beauty from an Irish town, everyone loved Agnes.
And somehow Agnes loved a scruff like me.
That slight turn in her eye enhanced her God sent beauty.
And she, ever conscious of that beautiful imperfection.

We shared a chocolate bars and fizzy pop in the cinema.
Our friends threw empty wrappers if they caught us kissing.
Someone told her Da, I never saw her for a month after that.
It was a long, long time, and my young head was up my backside.

One day the bank manager foreclosed on my father.
Birmingham beckoned for a family buckled, but resolute.
It was a clinical savagery of repossession, a sad uprooting.
I changed my days of wonder for nights in a black country factory.

I left a note for Agnes; scribbled by a bewildered teenage hand,
Full of love, promises, wait for me messages and a thousand Xs.
We were seventeen. Last week I saw an old newspaper cutting;
fifty years or so from the day I penned a thousand kisses.

I know now what happened to Agnes. So full of life; Jesus wept;
how could such a beauty be snuffed like a candle on that dark road?
I courted lovely Agnes whenever I was young,
Long years before these wrinkles creased my brow.

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