Mum’s Care Home is next to the cemetery,

Affording me some rather mawkish pursuits,

Like a health-giving walk amongst the dead!

This encouragement to physical exercise,

It occurs to me,

Is an exercise in egocentricity.

 

In my morbid ramble between the stones, 

I search for those I may have known.

Based on the dates of their demise,

Or names remembered from my youth.

My feelings, as I peruse these graves,

Are complicated, ambivalent and confused,

But what is poetry, if it tells not the truth?

 

‘We glimpsed you briefly through the trees

But you blew away in the morning breeze’

 

This epitaph brings tears to my eyes,

Enough to make me sympathise,

Momentarily.

But, in the end, it’s all about me.

 

Life is lived, our lives are viewed,

Through the prisms of our own content.

Does each one’s death diminish me?

Does ego’s dominion ever relent?

 

For whom am I weeping, if not for me?

A sense of relief. I outlived my friend.

A sense of dread, of honesty, 

I will join him there, certainly, 

In the end.

 

One day, someone will look down and say,

“I was at school with Johnny B!

 

He hasn’t lived as long as me!”