The answer

After many years of searching
for the reason or the meaning
of the life that I am living
if that is the thing I'm doing
I have come to the conclusion
that I'll never have the answer
So I'm giving up philosophy
and going to be a dancer

A message for my children

I've worked all my life to earn a good living
I've brought you all up as best as I can
So now that you've left home and are self-sufficient
it's time for me to be my own man

So I've sold the Volvo and got me a mo'bike
Growing older's compulsory, growing up is a choice
Ninety's the new sixty as I head down the highway
singing "born to run" at the top of my voice

Now I've left no money for coffin or funeral
So when I crash just break me for spares
Take them all I shan't need them wherever I'm going
and maybe the credit will help pay the fares.

Thanks

Before I eat I bow my head
and thanks I give for daily bread
Before I sleep at close of day
a quiet prayer of thanks I say
For family and friends that live
in peace and quiet my thanks I give
And all these things I say and do
are things I say and do for you

Letter from a father in 1919

Dear son I sit here safe and sound
and free from existential fears
With friends and family all round
but still my cheeks are wet with tears
For one who's absence I have found
does not diminish through the years
is buried in some foreign ground
with oh so many of his peers

You answered to the trumpet's sound
You looked so sure, you volunteers
So smart and brave as duty bound
you took your orders with three cheers
But life is short as canons pound
and modern warfare interferes
A generation's best cut down
as battle's glory disappears

My son I write these lines for you
remembering the life you gave
and pass them on to others who
you sacrificed yourself to save
And hope that they remember true
their debt to the forgotten brave
for you're an unknown soldier too
An unknown corpse in unmarked grave


Postscript 1939

Our racial memory is short
for having lost our fine young men
When only twenty years have passed
we're face to face to fight again

MyMuse

Like you I aspire to greatness
Aspire but rarely achieve
And those moments when
through the work of my pen
I do, then my muse I'll reprieve

For she stands on the edge of destruction
Accused of letting me down
and leaving me lying
all thoughtless and crying
enough tears that my muse could drown

But those flashes of rhyme inspiration
and wonderful metrical feet
that she is supplying
dry up all the crying
and look, there's my poem complete

Compline

It's midnight and all through the house there is silence
except for the grandfather clock in the hall
Its pendulum slicing the night into pieces
the seconds that echo tick-tock as they fall

There's no-one awake to remark on their passing
They fall and are lost in the dust on the floor
Disturbed in the night by a mouse and then vanished
away by the draught that blows under the door

From midnight to midnight the clock keeps on ticking
Counts eighty six thousand four hundred each day
Eternity keeps on renewing the seconds
The clock never runs out of things it must say.