A Hat Well Chewed
The day Teal ate your hatyou weren’t best pleased.He chewed it well, that dear dog,his sloppy yellow jaw gnawing awayat the brown felt and trim.
February 3, 2021
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.
The day Teal ate your hatyou weren’t best pleased.He chewed it well, that dear dog,his sloppy yellow jaw gnawing awayat the brown felt and trim.
I reach my hand up to the skyand touch a silencesoft as a silken spider’s web. The only sound, in blossom-laden trees,are songbirds,their twitter like
I’ve learnt that I mustrealise there’s far lesson the menuso I shouldflip and not flapstop then maybe godo headstands or somersaultsto look at life differentlystretch
I would love to dance among the stars,sprinkle stardust over the earth,light up minds and be-glitter hairstyles.I would love to walk around the moonfeel its
I cry for the world that waswhere people flew from place to placewhere cities bustled with lifeshops chirupped to the sound of money in their
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