A Comparison

This is in syllabics with a count of 9 and 10. I thought I wrote the poem with feminine endings throughout, but since I can see three which are masculine perhaps I was slothful or memory is mistaken. Too late now.

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   On Friday, fourteenth of November,

Two Thousand and Fourteen, in a south-west
   Suburb of London, the afternoon
Was calm after a wet and boisterous
   Cold front had passed through in the morning.
The wind was still, the air warm, the heavens
   Rinsed blue; level banks of cloud barely
Drifted eastwards, widely parted, glinting
   In the sopping sunlight. They recalled
In their horizontal sections pigeons’
   Wings, curvaceous and elongated,
As the pigeon folds them on its body.
   But most, with their sheen of translucent
Grey-purple texture, as smooth and polished
   As ice, they suggested the fillets,
Plump and moist, of skinless breast of chicken
   I’d purchased earlier in Waitrose.
Well then, I would eat the clouds for supper.

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© November 2014

 

On Not Having Much Luck With Women

Decades ago I visited Winchester Cathedral and have always remembered viewing the tomb of Bishop Fox with its gruesome sculpted corpse in a state of advanced decay. Bishop Fox was Secretary of State to Henry VII and Henry VIII and founder of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, so was a major figure. His tomb was part of a ‘fashion’ at the time to be truthful as to what awaits us all, great and small alike.
 

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I remember a girl, fifty years ago now,

   I had hopes she’d be my first “squeeze,”

On mooching too close she whipped off her shoe
   And threatened to crack my knees!
I was terribly miffed, we had quite a row.
   I ask you what can you do?

Later, I married, I can’t say it was fun,

   It flickered eleven long years;
Straight-lipped and focused, jolly as ’flu,
   Her smile froze the air round my ears;
At last like fever she upped and was gone.
   I ask you what can you do?

And then a lover; such all-night days!

   The bedroom department went wild;
But, ah, intrigued by a books-and-booze crew,
   Rapt as a big-eyed child,
She drifted off in Jack Kerouac ways.
   I ask you what can you do?                                                

And as for the daughter, I was taken aback

   When with jogging, smoothies and weights
She developed firm muscles and a fresh morning hue
   But also fresh loves and hates;
Like a sweat-wringing jockstrap, I was flung on the rack.
   I ask you what can you do?

Untroubled by women, in Winchester fane

   Bishop Fox’s cadaver decays,
Sculpted in stone for the startled to view,
   Memento mori it says:
All loves, all hopes, perish in pain.
   I ask you what can you do?

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© November 2014