A re-drafting of a poem posted to this blog a couple of years back. Relevant then to me as I continued to make my increasingly cautious way forward into the years immediately ahead, it resonates just that little bit louder now.
FRAGILE
Much as at the point when suddenly rain stops, or wind abates, or cloud obscures the sun,
there is a moment just between breathe in and breathe out when shock stops the spin and hum of it all
and in the silence and the stillness we are changed entirely.
At this point the surgeon reads morbidity into the slip and twist of tissues, the plasticity of form, the salt and vinegar of juices.
And from then, back on the street, you may glimpse over and again around the crook of each and every corner,
mortality’s black sleeve flapping like a torn flag.
I'm a post-retirement Drama teacher, currently working part-time. I have a grown-up son and daughter, three grandchildren and three young children from my second marriage. I write - principally poetry but prose too, both fitfully published. My poetry collection Ancient Lights is published by Phoenicia Publishing (www.phoeniciapublishing.com) and my translation of Blaise Cendrars' 'Trans-Siberian Prosody and Little Jeanne from France' (illustrated by my friend, the artist, writer and long-time blogger Natalie d'Arbeloff) is published by Old Stile Press (www.oldstilepress.com).
I play bass guitar & bouzouki in the song-based acoustic/electric trio Moorby Jones, playing entirely original material.
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I have a dormant blog with posts going back to 2004 at Dick Jones' Patteran Pages - http://patteran.typepad.com - and I'm a radio ham. My callsign is G0EUV
I too have been struck by how the significance of things can change when we return to them. I’m sure I’ve written poems that I thought weren’t up to much when I’,d finished them, left them in a notebook perhaps, and then maybe years later, pleasantly surprised myself on rereading them. And vice versa. It’s also possible to write about things without realizing it, only spotting a shade of meaning years later.
sisyphus 
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I too have been struck by how the significance of things can change when we return to them. I’m sure I’ve written poems that I thought weren’t up to much when I’,d finished them, left them in a notebook perhaps, and then maybe years later, pleasantly surprised myself on rereading them. And vice versa. It’s also possible to write about things without realizing it, only spotting a shade of meaning years later.
That’s right, Dom. Never throw anything away. At least poem parts don’t take up any physical room!