Anniversary song
My love for you is so strong –
it’s fathoms deep and furlongs long –
it spans the continents and disregards all borders.
My love for you is thick as soup,
it never dries, though it may droop,
it stays past closing and outlasts last orders.
My love is this and also that,
it wakes with me and comes to bed,
it feeds on laughter, tears, cheese and beers.
It lasted me through thick and thin,
it’s in my heart and in my spleen,
and here’s “Cheers!” to a lot more years!
The grand evolutionary procession:
striding elephants,
lumbering rhinoceri,
stalking lions,
gliding giraffes…
We walk tall next to them, leading our children, hand in hand.
Most of the ones on display are better adapted than us,
a lot are bigger,
a lot are stronger,
a lot are faster,
a lot are more vicious,
but none are as dangerous.
What is it that separates us from the rest?
Some of them use tools
some of them have complex language,
some of them sacrifice themselves for others
some of them murder the members of their own tribe…
Each specific characteristic is shared.
But in no other species do all these traits combine
to form our unique capacity
for self-serving
self-indulgent
self-destroying
self-delusion.
There is another train, mummy!
– Yes, there is. But it is not our train.
– Why is it going, then?
Oh, if the world made sense!
Unfortunately, my wishes
in the survival race
go, sleep with the fishes.
Our present form
is but a crude romance
of survivable norm
and insensible chance.
It is not in lost and found.
Maybe on the underground
I forgot it on the train?
Maybe cold autumnal rain
washed it off – down the drain?
Maybe, in the daily grind,
it slipped out of my mind
and, with finished magazine,
I just dropped it in the bin?
Or, in fact, it wasn’t binned –
maybe restless urban wind
blew it off with fallen leaves
to be caught among the eaves
in the gutters up above?
Where is my epic love?
The point that is worth recapping:
the sound of one hand clapping
is something that you can hear
with half an ear.
Forming a watercolour from a sketch –
new blooms and leaves are springing up on trees.
At five o’clock the pigeons squall and kvetch –
one wants to grab them by the neck and squeeze.
Deciduous adults drop woolly socks,
teenagers sprout knees and belly-buttons,
their clothes bloom into heterodox;
the streets are full of lambs that dress as muttons.
The warming sun incites the happy shirkers
as winds are loosing their winter punch.
The lawns fill with blooming office workers
and rubbish left from their picnic lunch.
The fuel-poor stop heating and start eating,
with fuller stomachs hearts begin to sing.
As life begins anew, the sheep are bleating.
The spring has come. Hooray for blooming spring.
