It is not worth
desiring a
professorship
rather than love
and happiness
and a long and
healthy life.
But all four would
certainly be nice.
Tag: genealogy
To be a pilgrim
The only
pilgrimage
worth making
is one to
your own past.
If you can find it.
Though mostly not
Probably best
we can’t go back
in time to events we
didn’t know,
at the time,
how we would get through
or even survive. It is
only in hindsight,
safe in the knowledge
you did survive, that
they seem like
places you would
want to visit
Exposure
Our eyes take
photographs
every day
as mementos
all through life
but most of them
don’t come out
Home time
The towns and
villages of our
family histories,
once active
with the tiny
details of every day
living, are now
just a painted
backdrop to a
disappointing
holiday
Wishful thinking
The ambitions
of yesteryear
collide with
the realities
of today
Best time to plant a tree
In later life
you are gardening
not for yourself
but for your
successors.
Homeward bound
Just as well the house
I lived in as a child has
been demolished,
bulldozed, removed from
the surface of the planet
and replaced by two new
houses with no history.
Not that I would want
it still standing but
extensively remodeled
and modernised. No
point in that other than
it representing the spot
on the planet where
I was formed and grew.
What I want, I suppose,
is to magically return
to the functioning 1950s
house, even the 1960s.
Furniture still in place,
pictures on walls, carpets
on floors, ornaments on
shelves, books in bookcases.
And people, people in chairs,
in kitchens, watching tv,
in the garden, welcoming
the New Year, talking of
the past. A house, a home,
reconstructed, revisited,
a place I once couldn’t
wait to escape for new
adventures, new sights
and sounds, new people.
But the past is another
country, and you can’t go back.
Those were the days my friend
Old age comes,
finally, like the
turning on of a
spotlight, when there
is no one left alive
who knew you
as a child.
Shredded
When you look back
on your long life
it is as if every detail,
every moment, was
written on a great scroll,
and then put
through a shredder, so
that you are reduced to
picking up thin strips
of paper, each with a
phrase, a headline,
an image, unconnected
to anything else.
Good luck putting
the pieces together.
