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.
Entering the silence,a stillness of concentration,quiet shuffling of pages turning,a scrape of chair leg,the ‘tut’ or ‘sssh’of tetchy adultswaiting to be disturbed. Then the tiptoed
The sun setting behind the pyramids in Egypton horseback, in the desert, with a stranger. Visiting Luxor with my teenage sons,the Nile slipping by alongside
The birds in my garden don’t listen to the news,can’t know of Covid-19 or the world in lockdown,are ignorant of families struggling in poverty or
This afternoon I trippedthrough black vinyl and battered covers of vanished years. Lost my mind as I tasted Stevie Nicks’ Bella Donnaand tangoed in the
Fifteen Chibok girls stand in a line,their faces sombre, eyes haunted,expressions of the near-dead.They mutter their names as if they are ghosts“Maimuna…Rifkatu …Naomi …” These
We’re driving down the revolutionary road,jolted and near-asphyxiated in the ancient Lada.It’s held together with fibreglass and tape.Beside us in the smog-filled street, a gleaming
You walked beside mesome forty years or more,my right-hand woman,leaving footprints on the pavements,in the sand, in my home. You saw my babies born,and die,
In a Chelsea restaurantthe young boy sits stiffly,school blazer straight-backed,hands flat on flannel grey,darting glances at his father,whose fingertip commandmesmerises waiters to his wide. Father
What a pretty pickle you’ve got us into, Dave,with all our politicians running in circles.Macmillan’s night of the long knives had nothing on this.They stabbed