Some Needless Sentimentality

Well I did write that sonnet and unusually here it is.

Dove With Poppy

Your taking, as requested, was as you had defined,
With lofty passion; showing much deceit
The hundred drops in one, your failure to eat,
Becalmed and in your lover’s arms entwined.
The dove has taken you across the poppy sea,
This bird, a haloed angel taken by the hawk,
In arguments and faces split with angry talk,
That always tears apart your gilded symmetry.

And now we live with all these faults and doubly,
Paint you over, redo the arc and only praise,
With fading images and much dispersing thought,
Of how we failed and let you sail away; we ought,
To love you still and as Virgil’s sad saint, raise,
To scintillating void, you at your end and free

What do you think? Too Much? Well I like it.

I was feeling slightly let down by the first chapter of The Tent, The Bucket and Me but the second chapter has taken off and rendered the book far more than a cheap 70's memoir. It is hard to reconcile the use of decimal money with the lighting of gas lamps and the total lack of indoor toilets in some parts of the UK; it gives the book a strange timeless air with the date somehow floating back between the eras of depression and space hoppers. Reviews seem so suggest an obsession with bodily functions and some proof-reading issues - ho hum.