Summer evening in Kew
It’s 8 o’clock in the eveningThe birds still singIn the silhouette of the treesA bat flies pastas if he knows where he’s goingThe trains whisk
October 6, 2026
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.
It’s 8 o’clock in the eveningThe birds still singIn the silhouette of the treesA bat flies pastas if he knows where he’s goingThe trains whisk
There’s a lot of love about if you look in the right placesThe quiet gaps of long-ago friendships that returnAround the corner from new friendsWho
My heart breaks as IPass a cushion on which you sleptNotice the cat flap without your little face poking throughSee the shed at the end
The house is full of empty spaceswhere once a black shape wandered,sleek in his feline body,perched high in his superiority,two golden eyesin their glossy black
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