Mama’s little soldier
went off to the war,
though he didn’t really know
what he was fighting for;
and when he came back,
he was in a box,
Mama visits him on Sundays,
and irons his socks.
Seagull swoops,
loops the loops,
and captures the moment,
that you lost your food,
forever, in your mind
the bird that had designs upon your treat;
swiped by beak and feet
in one mad rush of adrenalin…
gone!
But not forgotten,
as the gull gulps
his Ill-gotten gains,
upon your parade fall the rains.
Tears have ears;
only little tiny ones,
ones that you can’t really see;
but, be aware,
that they are there.
I’d lost my favourite knife,
I had it only then,
just a moment ago;
I want to use it;
but, do I have it? No!
it wasn’t there, and when
I looked, it wasn’t there again!
I looked up high,
I looked down low;
oh, where, oh where,
would my knife go?
I checked under my pillow,
and in the washing machine;
all the unlikeliest places
that my knife it could have been;
and then I found it,
my heart now be at rest;
it was where I’d left it;
in my late husband’s chest.
It’s Friday Morning;
it’s no good mourning Thursday,
just get over it.
The guitar hangs upon the wall
like a picture drawn a thousand times;
but, where is the use it needs to feel,
the lyric phrase, the quirky rhymes?
Strings, untuned, coated fine
with the dust of betrayal,
silently thrum to the tune
of an unheard song
from long, long ago;
when, or if, they shall play again
it’s beyond my knowledge to know.
On this day
my Nan was born
and my Dad did die;
it’s a strange day
if you look at it
in a certain sort of way.
Looking back,
Is often a sorrowful thing,
when family so familiar
became part of an ongoing unknowing,
joining the ranks of the many,
departing the lives of the few.
I stop and think about them
and how they were – those that I knew.
In the last week
I have been reminded
of an Aunt who was born,
a grandmother too;
and the endings of my dad, and his dad – who I barely knew.
In this modern day
of misuse and mishap,
I give my sad thanks to the reminders of an app.
–//–
@Ancestry
