My mother died in 2001 and I realize now that there is so much I don’t know about her life and can no longer ask. This is something mirrored by many of my friends. As older relatives die history dies with them, especially when written letters and diaries are replaced by emails and social media. It is easy for people to forget what happened yesterday let alone twenty years ago. A news story can be huge one minute and disappear from the front pages the next.
I have written this chronicle of my life expressed in poetry in order to give my grandchildren and their peers some insights into the life I and my generation have lived. We Baby Boomers have certainly experienced massive social and technological change.
Perhaps there are people whose lives turn out exactly as expected, but I imagine they are few and far between. Certainly the twists and turns of my life have surprised me and I suspect many others born in the post-war era would echo my own experience. We may have lived through the Swinging Sixties but we were often remarkably naïve about life and its possibilities! I hope these poems reflect some of this period.
A steady man with steady feet,a father to his apprentices,he walks the soaring cranelike you or I cross Waterloo Bridge;surefooted on the narrow poles,twenty-years safe-pacing
From the mud of Flanders’ fieldshell-raised by Napoleon’s troops,earth-churned by hundreds of horses’ hooves,the poppies are calling,the seeds of red bursting from disturbed ground,a sea
A poem I created re-reading his letters to me, written in 1966, as he mentored my teenage poetry. How lucky I was to have such
Letters from a long-suffering poet, 1966 Yesterday, I found eight faded letterslying loose in the covers of a battered red diary.Letters, some fifty years old,
It’s a lonely world without you,darling sister.No longer your familiar kind voicethere to listenwhen I worry about my boysor my grandchildren,or have problems with one
Never againThat’s what they said,Those Holocaust survivorsWho never wanted others to suffer as they did. Never againThat’s what they said,The parents who lost a child
Just as you think you’re doing well,You’re feeling strong,you’ve got it all sorted,so cool calm and collected,they catch you,out of the blue. It’s a hand
We won’t forget you, Ukraineas the sirens soundin the lonely forestswhere your children walk. We won’t forget you, Ukrainewhile the world’s leaderspontificate and prevaricateand your
I lie in my bath, and I think of her,many worlds away in Kiev,where the air raid sirens blareand drones endlessly circle overhead. I lie