LOST BOYS

I’ve written numerous poems over the years but many have been consigned to the wastepaper basket. 

It’s always a difficult decision, particularly if the poem in question has involved a good deal of hard work; but a bad poem benefits no one, neither reader nor writer.

The saving grace is that it’s sometimes possible to salvage a good line for future use or simply to serve as a starting-off point for another, better poem. 

One line that survived the destruction of a bad poem, was ‘brotherhood is built, not born’ and it encouraged me to write Twenty-One, a poem about a close childhood friend, John Simpson, who died in tragic circumstances, half a century ago this year.

The image below isn’t us, but it’s probably the way we saw ourselves at the time.

TWENTY-ONE

We started out with cocoa tins

attached by string: 

a telephone

of sorts; progressed to proper phones,

old army surplus; wired them up

and strung a line from my bedroom, 

to yours next door. 

We formed a link

that bound us fast through teenage years:

fifth form, sixth form, till, 

on you went to uni, I to unsought work.

Where you were cerebral and gauche,

I was the opposite, and yet

we hit it off: no other friend,

before or since, meant half so much.

In those strange, final months, we seemed

to drift apart: you went away

and I, in turn, 

went elsewhere too.

Estranged at twenty-one, we were.

You didn’t live to twenty-two.

Your picture, pale, in newsprint grim,

beside the stark facts of your death,

remains my image of you now

a half a century away.

My vanished childhood friend, 

you look so innocent, 

so fresh of face:

forever in a state of grace.