This poem was witten by my best friend, Chris Proudfoot, who I had the pleasure of knowing from 1962 (when we began grammar school together) until Chris's suicide in 2022. 

a hot, still July afternoon,
silence unbroken

through a cordon of dusty nettles
you plunge into a rank glade,
wicked with the scent of elder
and warm, ripe grass, 

heavy with anticipation of something not quite definable

it is high summer, just on the turn
as the last red campion falls to usurping rosebay,
and autumn though still distant,
slips into consciousness in an early yellowed leaf

light fails noticeably earlier now,
and as the stars fade in
and glowing planets begin their slow circling of the sky,
anticipation is irrelevant; at the moonrise hour
the memory goes back, instead, down the long, long years.

seconds, minutes, hours, days,
weeks, months, seasons, years - 
how could the waxing and waning , rising and setting
moon

have tricked you? led you, so
gently and seductively, down the riverbank of time,
waltzed you down the dear time of your life
brought you with a bump
to this wasteland of the present.

far, far away now the sweet days
of rank high summer and scented autumn,
children singing, soft-snowed Christmas
and sap-rising spring;

long gone the golden rod,
buckets full of michaelmas daisies,
the muffled creak of a footfall on new snow,
sharp winter mornings
blackbirds singing to blustery March

and the soft-shoed man in the moon
who slipped away, treacherously and quite unperceived,
for ever.

19 July 1983