Now I Am Old

Those who know Jack Jones's novel, 'Some Trust in Chariots' will spot my rather silly joke in the fourth stanza, i.e. there is no such place as Pontyglo. Jack Jones used it as a substitute for Pontypridd, which is so close one wonders why he bothered. My mother, no great reader, in her later years developed a liking for Jack Jones's novels of South Wales, where she had been born and brought up. With my father she moved to London in the 1930s seeking work and spent most of the rest of her life there. She could read and speak Welsh to the end.
   The poem's stanzas rhyme in pairs, ABCD, as in my previous poem, 'As Seen' posted on 21 October 2017.

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At eighty-nine she died
Shrunken and crumble-boned, 
Painfully little known
By her two ageing sons; 

A chapel girl, she’d hide

Emotion, though flat-toned 
And with a chiding frown 
Would indicate that once, 

So very long ago, 

Things had gone well before 
Her mother’s early death,
Her husband’s shock demise;

Exile from Pontyglo

And from her sons was sore –
One tamed by his wife’s breath, 
The other wreathed in sighs.

Wheelchair encased and ill, 

Rarely quitting her room,
Her life a sadness mixed
Of frustrate love and grief, 

She died – that grief was still; 

Coffined in her last home
She slept like someone vexed: 
Thus my mother in brief.

Now I am old I find

Myself replete in her –
A puzzled falling short
Though mobile on stiff legs.

Timon-fierce and unkind, 

Unmanned though by the stir
Loosed by my father’s fraught 
Death, I am twists and dregs; 

Women, a child, I’ve known

But none was true, and years 
Cold as an autumn night 
Have calcified to loss. 

Exiled, encaved, alone,
Snuffling the riddling airs, 
Some news not read aright 
Taunts with an Elmo’s gloss. 

Belied are all my thoughts 

Of a child’s jilting face; 
Clouds on the sky are chalked
But all dies that’s begun;

And soon with eyes like noughts

I’ll lie in a strait place,
Reproachful, baffled, balked –
Truly my mother’s son.
 

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© July 2014