Poetry

 

 

Tony Connor

Changeable Afternoon

Shadow dulls the waiting page
and the hand poised above it,
easing my reclusive thoughts
out of their hiding places,
hesitantly, as voices
whose slow gibberish relates
only by ancient habit
to my understood language,
then sudden sun dazzles sight—
shine of the desktop, trapped gleam
tangled paperclips give back—
and eager for me to write,
perhaps to make a poem,
words beckon me to my knack.

 

Fraternity

Roars of midnight revelry—
blasting music, laughter, yells
of drunken young excitement—
reach my under-blanket ears
before sleep conjures away
consciousness and cleanly kills
me off, with no worse intent
than death to tease a dreamer.

I awake to aching knees,
solitude and bright sunlight.
The day invites indulgence
of old age's long distress
in a welcoming silence
I ease my game flesh upright.

 

At Seventy-Nine

"Aching into my eighties,"
that's one way of putting it—
suitable for a poem,
if not the orthopaedist,
who'd want specifics, a list
of symptoms: neck? back? which limb?
For my purpose, a sonnet
lacking body will suffice.

But enough flesh to confirm
the indignities of age,
in the heft and reluctance
of this once-sprightly presence,
now a painful, brute bondage
as it approaches its term.

 

Shadowing

A girl used to follow me,
furtively—seldom in sight—
a glimpsed ghost far behind
in the streets of Manchester.
This happened during lunch hour,
when I was at a loose end,
though inwardly primed to meet
my doom or high destiny.

I was twenty, and alone.
The girl worked in Statistics,
down the same drab corridor
as mine, but on the next floor.
Why she shadowed me for weeks,
I suppose she must have known.

 

 

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