The Hope Of Utopia

When I was a child I was slow to talk,
when I was attentive it went unnoticed.

My parents walked everywhere;
dad to work, and the pub, and back,
Mother to the shops or her allotment.
They had no interest in driving.

Mother was often laden, time was often short.
To make me walk faster she would tell me
stories about the lives of my extended family,
something that I felt distant from,
her stories brought the family closer.

To us both our promised 'utopia'
was to travel faster than we could walk.
This meant that rare thing; a ride in a car
driven by a rich relative or neighbour.

This happened most when a relative married
where Mother dad and I attended the wedding.
To get there we were driven in a relative's car,
Mother and I had to be quieter than dad
and he said nothing much to the driver.

Had Mother distracted me with conversation
then I might have felt less car sick less soon,
but dad always wanted us to 'just be quiet',
to hide his discomfort at the formal occasion.

Thus my best 'Utopia'
was when the journey was short;
the sooner I was out of the car
the better to taste the fresh air.

Even in the most utopian of Utopias,
where weddings and marriages are cause
for celebrations, wherever 'there' is,
people will worry 'Are we there yet?'.