Roads, streets and street corners
Are so much more
Than an urban infrastructure…
They are keepers of time-
The interstices of our destinies;
They convey us from the past
To the present and from here
To the future.

Who knew then
That the street corners
Where we hung around
On lazy, bright afternoons
And warm, dusky evenings
Would echo their laughter
Far into a future
That is today.

The street-corner musings
On life, its irony and love
Continuing, despite distances
And disagreeing time zones;
When your day is my night
And my night is your day…
Yet we continue to chat on WhatsApp
As though we’re hanging around the corner.

Or the long drives that began
In the spring of 1991-travelled far…
Shared moments grew into a shared life.
These roads allowed us
To meander aimlessly
To simply revel in being together
Or to meet secretly- anywhere apart
From the places we were outgrowing.

On these very streets
We imagined a life of our dreams
In its tiny establishments we worked,
Positing our hopes for a larger life
A bigger future…
Not knowing then that in the future
That is today
We would come to miss terribly
Those roads, streets and street corners
Where we simply hung around.