Poem: Mistaken Identity
Books & Poetry
There’s no mistaking where this wry, nostalgic poem from Jeremy Page is going.
Mistaken Identity
One bright spring morning
I woke to find
I’d forgotten who I was,
so I packed a bag
and took the slow train
to the coast.
I found a tall thin house
with the number 52,
and in the attic a room
with bed, chair, desk –
my room, I thought,
so opened drawer after drawer.
A school report revealed
my Latin prose was “good”,
progress in physics “limited”
no predictions of greatness
nor any brutal indictments
for the boy who shared my name.
A black and white Polaroid
showed a couple from another age,
who might have been parents
while a faded colour photo
boasted Mediterranean features
the camera clearly worshipped.
Postcards from Italy
to a very young man
were signed illegibly,
and a library card,
a briar pipe, an Ingersoll watch
and a CND badge were little use.
I gazed from the window
at a strange, familiar landscape.
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Jeremy Page lives in the historic market town of Lewes in the South Downs of England’s East Sussex. He has edited the UK literary journal “The Frogmore Papers” since co-founding it in 1983. His short stories have been widely published, and he is the author of several collections of poems, most recently “Closing Time”, from Pindrop Press, in 2014. His translations of the Lesbia poems of Catullus, were published as “The Cost of All Desire” through the Ashley Press in 2011.
Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to poetscorner@solsticemedia.com.au. A poetry book will be awarded to each contributor.
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