Through the looking glass

I gave you some advice last night over the phone.
You were worried your best friend
was being unfair to someone
and wouldn’t change her position.

I suggested your friendship would allow you
to act as mirror and encourage some introspection.
To examine her position.

This morning
I looked at my face in the mirror
for the first time since childhood.

At some point in my life
I decided I wouldn’t look at myself.
It would be a vane thing to do.

But now I wonder if I was scared of what I might see.

Scared to know how others saw me.
Scared of what was behind those eyes.
Scared to witness the passage of time.

And to be honest
I was OK with what I saw,
the decay
the grey

and I saw my smile
for the first time,
and liked it.

John H Davies
2nd X 2024

Exit strategy

At least twice a month
he’d wake up
wishing he’d never been born.
 
He was used to the feeling,
which had accelerated
with the years
 
especially on reaching
a time of life when
people who’d led
 
ordinary ones were
thinking about retirement
 and settling down.
 
No chance in his case,
his pension stolen,
he’d need to work
 
for several years.
So it would be easier
to end it all,
 
to ease the pain,
the burden,
the responsibility.
 
There were two ways
to accomplish this,
he fantasized:
 
The first to discover
a means to depart
that did not hurt,
 
the other to suddenly
come into money.
So every week
 
he checked the lottery
in the vain hope
his numbers came up.
 
John H Davies
19 VIII 2024

Clocks back

Only silence
in the early hour
of grey October.
Just the guiding ticks

of unseen clocks
disturb the dawn.
Waiting to greet the
guardian who’ll gently

cease their beat.
One hour of rest
in all the year
as gentle time

adjusts her state,
and dutifully waits
to compensate.
Imagine what great deeds

might be achieved
in this, the absent hour?
What miracles might occur
if folk would stop

and contemplate.
And all too soon
the virtual hour is past.
And who’s to judge

if we employed it well,
and used its spell
to good effect?
For now the clocks,

awakened
tick again.
Accompanying Earth’s
rhythmic pulse

to test our spirits
without fear,
and meet the darker half
of the year.

28th X 2007 (re-worked 17th XI 2024)

Foot prints

We met again for the first time
after fourteen years, we’d calculated.
Our parents gone,
she came to the cradle of humanity
to restart our nascent journey.
 
And memories arrived on the flood,
as a Serengeti dry riverbed
fills in minutes
after long anticipated rains,
 
rejuvenating the germ and spirit of life
across the plains,
attending to nature’s shortcomings;
washing away old prejudice.
 
I was happy we ignored those things
that had separated us, instead
choosing to acknowledge
our shared heritage;
the joy and privilege
gifted to us.
 
And we both felt a warmth
to remember we
had a sibling still,
for there was always a niggle…
as a twin detects an absence
of the other.
 
Was it ever thus
for homo sapiens and his
forebears, whose footprints
are embedded in
ancient lava fields
not far from here?
 
For those social complexities,
developed and evolved over
three million years
and arriving at us,
make our fourteen
seem rather trivial.

(for Sian)
  
John H Davies
11^th VI 2024
Serengeti