In late May I lost my best and oldest friend to suicide and this week I lost my mum to Alzheimer's. This is an elegy for for my beloved grandfather, Pte Jack Prince, and for those two much loved people. 

 

The red-gold glow
of stormy autumn
is in my mind
leafy-mist exists
lights this late
October dawn recalling me,
curiously,
to the design hidden in words,
which swirl like smoke
rising from a fire,
tended by an old man in a flat cap
bedecked with medals
time-ridden, he is missing, gone  missing in 1916.

This fleeting meeting with the present
holds the lid, for a time, on his nightmare rhymes
of the war to end wars
of what hot metal does to human flesh 
life, now, is just something else that does not matter
except it does de profundis
hidden in these words
aberrant, obsessed, selfish,
sorry-wisps of cogitation coagulate,
then coagulate again fusing the light of another October dawn
into this troubled mind of mine
still, the old friendly moon haunts the sky of
dawn.

Deranged time,
passes strange
lines of time
over me.:
time fades
into this unquiet music of rhyme
which leaves
shrines for us to remember
the unaccompanied boys
stuck forever-more in the deluge of the western front

Just as leaves cling to trees
so does sadness cling to me
a time before the wind of change came into his mind
dead by his own hand.

Kicking through the  leaves 
there is a passing stillness,
as before a barrage
it is my mum conducting 
a silent reckoning.of what has gone and  what is to come
still the moon echoes bird song and scatters memories
everywhere, time flings us into the future
and all is not forgot. .