With age my mind loops
to link my present to my past.
At random and at strange times
it asks me to retrieve details
of holidays as a child, names
of essential amino acids, authors,
faces of school friends now old men or dead,
hymns and the litany of childhood church.
As the sun set on each day’s carnage
on the Western Front
you could hear the moaning of young men,
shattered and unable to move
embedded in no-man’s-land,
calling for their mothers as they died.
When my dad died I found
a book of poetry by his bed,
cringe-making sentimental stuff,
open at a page that extolled
the virtues of a mother, for which read his –
his first, sweetest, secret water-home.
Is this the circle,
the loop we try to close,
not reincarnation but a return
to our mother’s womb,
place of first and last love?
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