Uploaded September 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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NINTH – DEPARTURE


I

That stark and silent truth of bitter sadness
Under those muddy smelly rotting graves
Suspends a feeling of brittle full awareness
As trenches of death valiantly attempt to save

Atmospheres of land war almost complete
Molded your ideas and heady reputation
Making you deplore omitted poetic feet
To maintain a poetic tradition and convention

Your life is a travelling story which disturbs
As classical music in a cruel sad song
Depicted imagery in clear rhymed words
Of what is right and what is wrong

Always the accurate pessimist and perhaps a cynic
Exploring finding a perfect literary characteristic


II

There remains ever that feeling of evasion
Real understatement forever and yet not alone
Jumping through a series of rhyming repetitions
Which depressingly an older audience has known

Around about some pure reactionary pathos
Contained in powers of poetic professionalism
Mixed then added as a strength of topos
Amid streams of possible torrid toryism

A poetry created in such a passionate mind
As your standards combine the lost past
Of its most devastating murderous kind
From your first breath to your last

So “let me tell you the story of how I began”
Writing what you saw, such wicked suffering of man

RG Harrogate September 1973