Time Travel

Tantalising glimpses, down the tunnel of time,
brief windows shedding light.
Express trains of events, caught each census decade,
flickering snapshot records.
Rattling by silent tableaux, actions forever frozen,
a zoetrope of past lives.
 
History coming alive, before your very eyes,
real people not dry facts:
Widows in the workhouse, poor cotton slump victims,
airmen killed in the war,
non-conformist marriages, dual official registers,
households of sibling orphans.
 
Young rural pioneers, all shifting to the towns,
and to shorter lifespans.
Spiderwebs of migrants, stretching across country,
far from established roots.
These now distant relations, with ever larger families,
a chain of repeating names.
 
Homes they all squeezed into, and dwelt in day to day,
bricks no longer standing.
Fashionable suburbs swamped, by growing city slums,
areas in decline.
Weddings in vast new churches, since fallen into ruin,
all lost and wiped from the map.
 
Trades and occupations, with unfamiliar names,
from industries long gone.
What were their thoughts and hopes? Where did they eat and meet?
How did they spend their time?
So much elusive detail, still remains beyond our reach,
in streetname echoes of old.
 
Diligent detective work, challenging logic puzzles,
and dates that just don’t add up.
Illegible cursive script, inconsistent misspelt names,
compound transcription errors.
But there’s a fascination, in reconstructing fragments,
of these lives so long ago.