A VISIT TO ANNE'S HOUSE


​Poetry 
by 
​Kathleen Serley
​
​

​Nicest days…bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly like pearls slipping off a string.
                                                                                                            Anne of Avonlea

I have walked the twisting paths of Lover’s Lane wandered deep into the Haunted Wood to wait by your window lamp at the ready and wonder what message you might send Diana as Japanese school girls gather hushed at your front door    they’ve met you I am told through their school books their teachers holding you up repeating Live to beautify your name    before they’re given the nod to enter before they climb the stairs I hear you say Be gone dull care seek beauty… refuse to see anything else and they, like I, have traveled all this way to tell you we will try    try to catch those pearls as they slip one-by-one off a string
 
                                                            on your window sill
                                                            bloom-heavy geranium
                                                            thrives in stout clay pot


Picture

​
​Kathleen Serley appreciates the way retirement has opened her days to poetry: the poetry of gardening and grandchildren, of long walks and childhood memories, and the joy of setting it all down in verse. She still has most of her Anne books placed prominently on a bookshelf.

Author's statement: This poem is a musing on my recent trip - a pilgrimage actually - to Prince Edward Island to see Anne's house in person. Our tour guide told us that the Anne books are included in the Japanese school curriculum to give students an idea of how a girl in the West acts. I thought this was interesting because I remember loving the Anne books when I was a girl, and I hope she did inform how I grew up. Now tour buses with girls and their mothers arrive regularly from Japan and, indeed as I stood looking out from Anne's bedroom window many Japanese girls waited in the yard below. I'm sure Anne would have welcomed them in her effervescent way. But they didn't seem to miss an actual Anne, so real was she in their imaginations, as she has been in mine for all these many years.