Literally 'touching' poem, Max. Amazing how stuff so long ago, comes up and puts a bite on the psyche for one last time (or not!)
There's a bravery to looking, or, certainly, looking 'close and writing well'.
What does 'salad days' mean in your sense of it or 'down there'??
Stephen
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
--- On Tue, 2/3/09, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: Max Richards <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: snap: salad days
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Tuesday, February 3, 2009, 1:58 PM
Salad Days
In 1945 when I was eight, Colleen was nine or ten,
surely the loveliest girl in all of Taranaki -
kind as she was lovely, softly-spoken, her family's pride
the way she smiled despite her leg in splints from 'infantile
paralysis'.
Always I see her striding keenly across the school playground,
my sister her great friend with her.
Now within six short months my sister and Colleen are both dead.
Gwenda I knew all her life, Colleen just then and later about twenty,
lovely as any girl anywhere in Auckland, my mother's boarder.
We went to the musical of the year, 'Salad Days', sat cramped in
'the gods',
pressed knees unavoidably, home by the last bus, humming the melodies.
Incendiary to sleep under the same roof when one is such an age.
Never the same bed, but once we tussled lightheartedly
while mother cooked dinner and my hand stopped on her demure breast.
Sorry, Colleen, we were not courting. We went our ways,
lived long lives, never saw each other old.
Your funeral, Colleen, in far Mount Wellington
occurs without me, while here I recall just that once
when my shy hand paused on your breast, we stopped skylarking,
looked in each others' eyes and never kissed.
Wednesday 4 February 2009
Max Richards
Doncaster, Vic
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