Poem 323

I still have this friend of fifty years standing … the age we are now and the two generations above us that are (mostly) gone amplify the minor chord of this ‘nothing stays the same but change’ theme …

( I like death as a big dog, and the tawny businessman suddenly finding life irrelevant … I might have been thinking of a scene I saw in a wildlife doco of a geriatric lion collapsing in its final moments … )

A Great Irrelevance

I have a friend whose grandmother
was pissed on by a lion once

a few years later
                                  when death sprang on her
like a big dog it might have smelt some of the lion
still about her and been puzzled
someone else had laid a claim

but then lions die too
                                            of heart attack of stroke
like any tawny businessman sensing a great irrelevance
in the mid-afternoon

keepers die
                         zoos die
and faithful old men and women
wander aimlessly
                                    bags of bread crusts
growing staler
by the hour