Old Haunts

Old Haunts

I quietly enter a home oft visited
My grandmother's small cottage
The rooms are all so vivid today
In this long-gone place of yesterday

I sit in the backseat at the drive-in
With cars lined up side-by-side
Now, that lot is empty and gray
The movie stars long gone away

I walk the aisles of an old store
A place I worked so long ago
I see shelves with the items they bore
However this space exists no more

I pace a floor, crying child in hand
Trying not to wake another
Yet that nursery is now a den
And those children grown men

Too many of our old buildings
Stand no longer in this world
Existing now not of brick or steel
Only in memory, no longer unreal

Looking about the spaces of my now
Longing for the rooms of my then
Without a pause, I jaunt
Into my head, an old beloved haunt

Joseph Mello
7.17.2009