Mortal thoughts

Mortality has been weighing on my mind of late (nearly getting myself killed by a psychotic driver the other night doesn't help!), so I felt an immediate affinity with this piece by Gavin Ewart when I came across it this morning.

Ewart is a British poet perhaps best known as (well, for a long time known to me only as) the compiler of the Penguin Book of Light Verse; his own work deserves wider recognition.

Yorkshiremen in Pub Gardens

As they sit there, happily drinking,
their strokes, cancers and so forth are not in their minds.
Indeed, what earthly good would thinking
about the future (which is Death) do? Each summer finds
beer in their hands in big pint glasses.
And so their leisure passes.

Perhaps the older ones allow some inkling
into their thoughts. Being hauled, as a kid, upstairs to bed
screaming for a teddy or a tinkling
musical box, against their will. Each Joe or Fred
wants longer with the life and lasses.
And so their time passes.

Second childhood: and 'Come in, number 80!'
shouts inexorably the man in charge of the boating pool.
When you're called, you must go, matey,
so don't complain, keep it all calm and cool;
there's masses of time yet, masses, masses....
And so their life passes.

Gavin Ewart (1916-1995)