When I Dream Of Home

When I dream of home, it's of that flat
where we lived till I was 16,
with its not quite smooth brown wood doors
whispering across the carpet,
each not quite fitting
in a unique and different way.

We left on a Saturday afternoon,
brown settee squeaked onto a flatbed wagon.
Toys seeing the light for the first time in years
on a brief journey from loft to loft,
a donkey on wheels and a smiling red car
stirring something in me, then and now.

It snowed on our moving day.
Flurries in May, just our luck.
And as my mother cleaned newly discovered places,
our home became an alien landscape,
the fixtures of our life removed and moved
to prove it's not the walls that make a home.

Later, as I stared into the dark alone,
my first night in a room of my own,
surrounded by half-dismantled and rebuilt bits,
listening to the airing cupboard's unfamiliar whoosh and trickle,
I didn't know I'd left a bit of me behind
to be revisited, but not reclaimed, when I dream of home.