The Other Life

It continued snowing.
The furniture hadn’t drifted away in a removal van.
We kept Sam. We didn’t catch a taxi
to Heathrow. The hi-fi kept going.
We didn’t fly twelve thousand miles.
We stayed at home.
My father continued working in the City.
My mother lived.
She called into the morning, staccato,
‘SamSam, SamSam, Sam’ and he grew fat
on his diet of Kit-e-Kat.
I remained the ‘I’ I’d got to know.
Next winter the snow
was even deeper. 1963. Soon, The Beatles.