EVENING

As the dark day moves into darker evening,
and the pale pin-pointed lamps are lit in the street,
as the typists stand shivering by the bus-stop,
wreathed in their warm breaths, stamping their cold feet

on the greasy pavements – I seem to see manifested,
hanging like a foggy aura above their tired heads,
the word Home.  I feel the surge of their silent yearning,
all hearts turned toward fires and food and smooth beds.

This is the sweet hour of expectation.
Only a little while and they will have forgotten this;
only a little while and the day will be drowned
in the sound of a child’s voice, the touch of a lover’s kiss.

Their senses will be washed by music for the Forces,
the cheerful clanking of plates, the running of taps;
and they will sit talking, or nodding over a cup of tea,
with books and knitting and drowsy cats in their laps.

These are their wages, the true fruits of their labour;
vaulted above all things, above dreams or ambitions or
careers;
for a job can be lost, and another as easily forgotten,
but Home is carried tenderly, like a babe, throughout the
years.

The darker evening moves into darkest night.
The typists change their attaché cases to the other hand;
and they turn up their coat-collars and sigh
they put their papers under their arms, and stand.

As the buses thunder by with lidded eyes,
the queues wait sombrely in their appointed places,
but I see the great lights that are lit for a homecoming
blazing like beacons on their patient faces.

~Virginia Graham, 1942

Some things never change.  I can relate so well to this “sweet hour of expectation” as I wait for the metro to take me home to warmly-lighted windows and two sweet babies, who are often in their pajamas when I walk in the door.  And I can relate to that ghost hour between work and home (well, for me it’s more like 35 minutes – my commute is decent) dissipating with the cacophony of children’s voices as soon as I get home – but that’s okay, because like the typists in Virginia Graham’s poem, this home contains my real wages, the riches that I work hard to earn every day.