Poem written for Commonword’s How Green is Our City? pamphlet, produced as part of the Manchester Wellbeing and Green Festival.
Forgetting / Future Memory
Do you remember what it was like to go outside?
Remember when we walked around the park, that park, wait, yes, I think it was that other park,
across the city, down that road, just on the edge of Greater Southern Manchester (not quite
Stockport, definitely not Trafford, my geography isn’t as good as it could be or might be if I had really
studied, if I had really spent more time with Google Maps rather than outside in the air).
Remember when you and I held hands, or didn’t hold hands, or thought about holding hands, or
laughed, did you laugh because I certainly laughed, that great big rousing thunderclap of a laugh, and
we, I, collected pinecones, and conkers, and saw a double rainbow and, if Piccadilly Gardens counts
as a park (it almost definitely doesn’t in this poet’s understanding of a park in Manchester),
remember when we sheltered against each other from the rain coming in from both sides.
Do you remember what it was like to go outside when it was so hot our faces were as radiant as
angels’, and we were beatified in the sun, it made us holy, and we were at the edge of one of the
largest parks I have known in Greater Southern Manchester. Angelic, waiting for another way to be
together, to be outside, to remember what it was like to go outside from the future, from our
vantage point that’s yet to come.
Harriet Lander 