A major transition that most of us have had, some of us many times over, is buying or renting a house. And the houses we live in also undergo changes. My poem concerns a move I made many years ago, to a large old house outside the Australian country town of Armidale. It had been lived in by a single family and two grown-up daughters since being built some ninety years before.

When we moved in, the house was filled
with simple things that age had hallowed—
plaster mapping ragged patches,
slabs of black slate broadly shallowed
by footsteps treading thresholds thin.

Walls laced with after-thoughts of pipe.
Woodwork scored with scrapes and scratches.
Corners strung with spiders, creeper
reaching in past broken latches,
dirt and dust, and nothing chaste.

A stubble of nails along the porch
for oilskins, scarves, and broad-brimmed hats.
Rusty buckets, bridles, traps
for foxes and the barn-bred rats
that farm-house cats found too much trouble.

Echoes there of other lives—
young love and laughter, old-world graces—
muted by the weight of years,
dim voices without forms or faces,
chiding us gently in the thick, dark air.

Graham Walker