Late Poems

 

43rd Anniversary

On our 43rd anniversary,
Taking coffee and cake with this daughter
We raised - mothered and fathered and taught her -
A lifetime ago in the last century;
Both the kids off her hands temporarily
In playgroup and school; this respite we’ve bought her
A return to her life’s first quarter
As our soul-charged responsibility

As across the table her friend ciaous warmly,
An Italian Madonna with infant on breast
Whom she feeds as bold as love before me,
While dissing our granddaughter’s school
And we, age-spotted, crumbling, short of zest,
Nod, smile, have been through and see through it all.

Ascension 2022 (England Win The Euros)

“He fell over! I would chant gleefully

At any woman player I saw faking it

Like a man, which (for old boys mistaking it)

Was to be heard, self-satirically,

As revenge on the tittering twattery

Abuse of glorious athletes in bloke-kit

Made so female, fluent and fabulously fit,

My her-zero joke should be his-story.

Now, in parks, homes, schools, wherever white is worn, 

Earps, Bright, Bronze, Daly, Stanway, Williamson, 

Stokes, Wubben-May, Carter, Greenwood, Walsh,

Scott, Kirby, Mead, Hemp, White, Roebuck, Hampton,

Toone, Parris-Kelly, England, Russo; all’s

Changed, utterly: an empowering beauty is born.

Quo Vallis

(The Road Led To Frome As All Roads Lead To Frome…) 

Our Sixties’ ‘Milk Street’ is now ‘the Vallis’
Its new BOYS wing (1909) still flying
Somerset’s wyvern, still teaching
Under a portico like a Greek palace 
How to beat this Station Voice from ‘Quo Vadis’:
“If you see a Rodden man escaping
(Through the old Grammar) his shoplifting
Rap from 1965, call Frome Police!

Do not apprehend him or ask his name
In hotels; he’ll react as if accused
Of scrumping apples or palming the cane.”
Here be wyverns, here be the roots
Of the wings they couldn’t clip, the anytime 
Checkout I can never leave behind.

Frome July 2022. 

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