Sticklebacks

I remember: jam jars on strings,
holiday fishing nets, days when time stood still.
Wading through the dusty field of tussock grass
to the splashy brook that meandered through.
And that pool on a bend in the stream,
where the flow of the water slowed: it was ours,
made by us from clods and stones
collected for a dam - and how it crawled
with shrimps and water-fleas,
beetles and boatmen and little snails,
froglets sometimes, and the minnows
and sticklebacks that were our chosen quest.

We were not far from the town: familiar noises linger in my mind:
a rumble of traffic from the main road,
steam whistles from the shunting yards, the steady hum
of the English Electric works.
But this was our bit of country - I remember
the time we saw a kestrel drop down to catch a vole,
the shrew that dashed out in front of my scooter
(I crashed it and lost a wheel);
and always the fine golden sun ruling the sky,
and always the hours and hours we had till tea.

But the sticklebacks were our delight -
we  caught them and brought them home
to stay a night with us, silver fish in silver jars,
protected from cats behind a cardboard screen
in a corner of our back yard.  And I’m sure that next day
we must have taken them back to the brook,
or maybe it was Dad who did it.
For by then we children had a new quest:
hunting for fat hairy caterpillars. In the same jars,
emptied of water and stuffed with miscellaneous leaves,
with kitchen-scissored holes in the black lids,
they would pupate, to emerge as bright tiger moths
before the long days ended of our childhood holidays
under that bright and glorious and forever sun.