To Oscar
On the river bed of night
I have laid with a pebble
pressed into a middle vertebrae,
where spades paddled my ribs,
I awake. Last year’s dinner gong
reverberates in my ears
my nose is red, my hair seems
further receded, belly more big
throat dry, nose blocked:
I have got a cold
from the weekend’s snot-nosed kid,
Oscar, two and a half years old.
When he has had 20 times as long
he will find, unless he eschews:
cigarettes, red wine, late nights
and a drowning idleness
he’ll feel a little ropey too,
but then, I suppose, he already does,
but does not complain. Oscar,
what did I read just yesterday?
Surely the lives of the old
are briefer than the young.
Note: Last lines from Robert Lowell’s Soft Wood.
Dominic James lives in the South and has been writing poetry for 4 years. He attends local poetry events and finds: “listening is the hardest thing.” He has been published at home and abroad.