To Absent Friends

TO ABSENT FRIENDS

As the distended rollers break
Upon that ocean shore
I think of all the hearts that beat
But now will beat no more.

Friends who were once so close to me
Whose lives with me were one
Who now have lost their lust for life
Lost it, and have gone.

Sadness is no gift to sorrow
But memories linger on
It’s when I watch the ocean’s waves
It’s them I think upon.

Why this should be I do not know
For me there’s no release
It is the breathing of the waves
Confirms our own will cease.

Perhaps it is their constancy,
Their never ending thrust
Confirms our own ephemeral lives
Will end soon, as they must.

Remembrance

‘The Churchyard’ – WHB … Pen: 1981

With bared feet
and sadness in my soul
I walk in the shallows
the waves rippling to my bare feet
I follow the ribs of the sand
to their end
in the swell of the next wave
and by their disappearance
I recognise the promise
of their continuation
for the world is in flux
a life beginning
as another ends
memory
fading at first
soon settles
into expectation
an affirmation
as the embers
of all that cease to be
are carried forward
in the seeds of
a future hope

Coffin of Iron

Photo:  WHB – Somerset, 2019   ©

He had died of his wrinkles
Liver spots and age lines
Gnarled and creviced skin
Dusted and singed
By his Lifetime’s fevered furnace
His lungs smoke-charred
Legacy of a thousand undoused fires

As old as the hills he trod
As the bubbling beck he bled
I see six stalwart pall bearers
Hard as ancient twisted nails
Arise from their bed of iron
Raise the dead-weight anvil
His final ferrous coffin
To shoulder height
Begin a steady passage
Through the leaden winter streets
Beneath those snow-clad Northern Hills
Their shrouded clouded sky
Seemingly forever draped
Atop the silent iron tomb

Carried through the dark gate
To its final resting place
Fitting memorial to a smith’s life
Gifted again to the ironstone earth

In memoriam: Harold Booth, Yorkshire blacksmith & farrier; 1909 – 1987

From a son to his father

The Black Bra

Black on Red
It stood
Proud statement
Discarded in frenzy
All passion spent

Improperly passive now

Objet trouvé
Found flotsam
Overstating its status
Bright
Bold
Yet benign

No threat 
No danger
The sad music of lust
Transmuted
Statuesque

Fashioned by whim
Now become
A seafront memento
In memoriam
Of some casual
Teasing escapade
A littoral reminder

Perhaps

Of a purple period
Of passion

Part Bikini

Or

Plain Brassiere

 

Photos by kind permission of Canadian artist, Alma Kerr

In Memoriam – D.A.K. #1

David Alexander King

Those of you who remember my first two blog posts – on 25th and 28th July this year, will recall that I dedicated my ‘Rolands Ragbag’ blog to David Alexander King (DAK).

DAK was, for many years, a teacher in both London and Kent, before becoming  headteacher of a Special Needs School in Surrey.

He both encouraged and inspired me to dip my talents, such as they are, into the blogging world.  He himself was a prolific writer, a poet and artist, who published a new poem nearly every day for several years before he sadly died three years ago this month.  David found particular inspiration in the work of the Irish Nobel Prize Winning poet, Seamus Heaney, who died just 2 months before David, in August 2013.

DAK’s work is still accessible on his website at:  picsandpoems

I am taking the opportunity to mention his work again in his memory.

 

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The photograph below is of Dave and was taken by me in 2010 on the shores of the Bristol Channel, at Brean Beach, Burnham-on-Sea, in Somerset . . .

LIVING DANGEROUSLY . . .

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