on and on for ever ...

Day 7 of my personal Poetry Week, wherein I've attempted to highlight a variety of recent 'poetry purchases ' ...

... and, we're back where we started, with another Alan Jenkins poem - but this one is taken from his pictured 2005 collection :-)

Back to more regular-blips from tomorrow!


A Late Lunch

How often, when I walked that path 
Between the cows becalmed in the water-meadow
And the chink and rattle of small boats on their moorings,
Or went out into your garden with scissors for rosemary
And stood a moment under the warm wide night and the stars,
I wanted it just to go on and on --
The path, the night, and all of us, together,
The drinks tray waiting and the owl or curlew calling
And that blown rose-bush at the window, so much given back
That I thought I’d lost for ever.

                                                   Now you’re gone
I see you, G&T in hand, in your favourite chair,
Squinting as you take another drag
Or setting out lunch in sunlight on the brand-new deck
You were so proud of, that last summer. Across the creek,
Those sloping fields where a combine harvester
Crawls up and down between the water’s edge
And the low horizon; glimpsed through leaves,
The little boathouse, wind-bent sedge
And shingle foreshore, where ebb-tide and flood
Wash gently at old pilings and cormorants share
The winding channels and the shining gull-marked mud --
All just going on and on for ever.

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Alan Jenkins (1955 - )

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