ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

As I move steadily towards yet another birthday it's sobering to remember that, already, many of the boyhood friends who started out on this same strange journey have failed to make it this far.

Here's a poem, from my Stone Witness collection, that commemorates one such youthful friendship.

The image is from Elia Kazan's excellent film adaptation of John Steinbeck's great novel, East of Eden.
The cocoa tins referred to in Line 1, below, were a primitive type of field-telephone popular with schoolboys in the 1950s.

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.