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Sunday, 17 August 2025

Consideration for an older man

One frosted window

One breath of fresh blown air

Care there within you

A most

Neo-non-revolutionary stare


Love

Given and never forbidden within you

Unfair

The prayer to bring you

For soldiers and sly ones to care


Gentle gentleness

Tender in your every touch

You dare

To be your own one person

Stand tall, always, everywhere


Time changes

And you easily explain

Without attack, forgiveness even

That the most wilful act

Taken so that we cannot, can not, go back



Saturday, 16 August 2025

Out into the white light and the deeper snow

You knew

It was there within you

Cross transference

Of the frosted window view


Blown across a country

Caught up in a revolutionary tale

Young poet, young doctor

Life set out to sail


Now, in a later year

We would

If we could

Slow you down


Take our time, take your time

To join you more completely

Share all then and more

Of all of that majesty which you owned



Friday, 15 August 2025

Forever red

I could step over this precipice

But is it that, the exclusion, the non involvement

This and that which has kept me sane

With tears in my eyes

I watch your final speech, your detachment

It seems you reach for my release


You use the word progressive

Who could argue with that

And for today at least, no one does

But this is not about you

Or your just and worthy cause

It is about me; should I, could I, take up the gauntlet


What about the idea that the student

Works harder than the master

Without the equality of pay

Or on the day that nothing happens

Either for that son of mine or so so many others

Of his generation, not tomorrow nor thereafter


Or of my own time ahead, without security

Of tenure or pension and anyway

What would that offer

Except the chance to rant and rave

I could step over the precipice

Or, after any and many a second thought


I could stay in the calm of this my lost and forgotten land



Thursday, 14 August 2025

I hear voices

Wood; turned, sanded, polished and varnish

Worthwhile work

Worthy of saving you from the sanatorium


A pint of beer, a reminisce

Of whatever happened

In that society of social gathering


Inside another room, twenty seven cubic metres

Nowhere further

For your outreach thoughts to roam


Should anybody work it out

The past is to pass it on

About that other idea, to clear you out


A coffee cup, a cake, an interrupted conversation

Stay awhile, please don’t go

Help me to understand


I like you, you are quite ordinary, and you see

I am frightened, I am afraid

Of becoming old, of being a responsible adult


It’s fun to play, to think unruly thoughts

Not to go home; not now or ever

Never not never to settle down



Wednesday, 13 August 2025

Cake and Ale

Rectangular slots

Punched

With a fifty-tonne, more or less

Up and down printers press


Round wire loops

Bound

With a mothers son, more or less

In and out the crimplene dress


On the coffee table

Or by the kitchen fire

Madeira baked in the cooker

Of that we ever never tire


This booklet of mine

Rectangular rooms

Roundabout the houses

With a mothers son


Flowered vases

Peonies and posies

Victoria, Birdsedge

And Hepworth school