We visibly crumble
before our own eyes.
We fall apart.
Our hearts break.
We burst
into tears. We
are in pieces. We
are worn down. We
cannot stand
another minute.
But then we do
stand another minute.
And then another.
And another.
And the sea of emotion
that washed over us
departs.
You’d hear him coughing
in the early hours.
It almost put me off staying
but Ackroyd, Antony
(head of the alphabet
in the grammar school roll call –
Ackroyd? – Here, sir
Arnold? – Here, sir…
and so on
until…
Wilson? – Here, sir
Young? – Here, sir)
was always such a laugh
that to stay over
(they weren’t called sleepovers then)
and have to listen
to his dad’s hacking cough
in a room close by
was a price worth paying.
Yet that friendship
was short-lived.
By the second year
we were in different forms
and had formed different friendships.
I’ve no idea what happened
to Ackroyd or his dad.
I expect he’s dead (the dad).
And thinking, now, about that cough,
(I was about eleven when I stayed
and gave no thought to his dad being ill)
it was probably an early death.
After I’d biked around the loch ten times
and run up and down a couple of mountains
I sat down here to catch my breath.
I whipped out my camera
to capture this wondrous moment.
This is how the world looked tonight
in this glorious natural light.
I can’t tell you how disappointed I was, though,
that the view didn’t transform itself
into a more serious and highly processed black and white.
Bernard Young Poet 