This time,
the day before I arrived
they had torn down the house
my mother had lived in as a girl - 
the house my father visited
when he was courting her.
This time,
people were going through the rubble,
looking for what they could use.
So we walked towards the railway tracks
where she had walked with my father
those days when she was a teenager - 
sixteen, seventeen - and he was just
twenty - and as always
they had so much to tell each other -