From a prompt to write a portrait of somebody important to you...
A cricket ball at seventy...
...diving for it like a teen,
but even that was long ago
and the most abrupt of angels long since called
one Monday in the home which is not—
there are no homes, in the post-modern
Post-Kathleen Era, where a pad might be incontinence
or else for YouTube on the move
and at least one grandchild is married
to a MOTSS. There is still sun
such as warmed Lino in the kitchen in the back yard
of the terraced house where the loo came indoors
in the sixties and the dog slunk off a final time
in nineteen eighty-two.
We who are yet to die...
we miss you, the cloth cap and the grin
the lunatic spin, and diving for the cricket ball
when you were seventy. We miss that you never complained
not once
and were proud to pay the income tax—
which meant you'd earned some money.
Mother says that you made shoes
as a necessity
and reared a pig as a luxury
and a Christmas meal.
They say in time
every wound will heal
but this one
brought its golf clubs.
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