Poems by Tony Dawson

Brief Candle!

When I’ve strutted my allotted hour upon the stage
what kind of idiot’s tale will I have told?
How much sound, or fury? How much rage?
What will my life have signified once I’m dead and cold?
As the wick burns down, my candle starts to gutter
and this bit player prepares to exit his stage right,
as shadowy as any other actor with few lines to utter.
My role has been an earthy, grounded part, no knight-
in-shining-armour, just an ordinary man,
sometimes considered stubborn as a mule.
Though life has hardly ever gone to plan
I’ve tried to live according to the golden rule,
a reliable, dependable homme moyen sensuel.
Will my good intentions pave the road to hell?

 

True Love

My wife’s a believer, though I am not.
Her unspoken mission has long been
to redeem this worn-out old rake
from a life of sin and rein me in.
She being a religion I can profess,
my devotion to her has proved a success,
but I still don’t believe in the life hereafter.
“Where should I scatter your ashes, my love,”
she asked one day, “when you are dead?”
Without hesitation, I immediately said,
“I think I’d prefer your side of the bed!”

 

Palimpsest

All of us are living palimpsests
whose cells are overwritten
as we grow from birth to death.
The story of each of us is rewritten
with every passing day. Episodes
are scrubbed or altered as we age.
The toddler’s story is replaced
by his older self at every stage
of maturity until life’s final phase.
The previous versions of ourselves
live on as memories that linger
as well as those that fade away.

 

Ossifrage

The Spanish “bone-breaker”
sounds like a Mafia enforcer,
someone to be feared.
Instead, it is one of nature’s
airborne waste managers
that keep the environment clean.
While other vultures can only strip
the flesh from animal carcasses
and leave the bones behind
like picnickers leaving litter,
the lammergeier or ossifrage
clears up all those skeletal remains.

This vulture’s vast domains
are the skies above the Pyrenees
and the Cantabrian mountain range.
The bone-breaker’s instinct drives it
to swoop down to seize in its talons
the femur of a chamois or a rabbit’s ribcage,
or the bleached remains of a brown bear
before soaring above the mountain peaks.
Once aloft again, it releases the bones
to be smashed to smithereens on the rocks below.
The ossifrage then settles to gulp down the fragments.
Life sustained by death at the bottom of the food chain.