Not 'Summertime' but Autumn's 'September Song' [Revision]

  

I was going to say something about how the parental promises

in ‘Summertime’ are lies; because living is never easy, not

for anyone. But then I remember the children in Gaza,

and I decide I can’t really complain. I thought to point out

that my days dwindle down, but then I recall I’ve had 84 years.

And I remember the children in Gaza, and in other places too,

who don’t get to live many days at all, and for whom that living

is brutal, shocking, agonised, insane. And I think that whatever

I’ve endured (and there have been some things) in the face

of all that, I have suffered nothing. (Grief, pain, but no horrors.)

There are truths which defeat even poetry. Which even song

can’t adequately reflect. Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ might come

closer, but I’m a painter in words, and they fail me. Meanwhile

threats of both flooding and fire repeat daily around me.

I can’t even think it’s peaceful and safe here in my own country.

I lived, I perceive, through a sometime Summertime,

when the fish were sometimes jumping – right into the boat

from the lines we trailed. Where we grew no cotton, but 

the sun was often high, benignly. I see that my Autumn days 

are dwindling peacefully and comfortably, precious enough.

The poem has nowhere else to go, yet I don’t want to end

on even a weak, qualified high note. To count my blessings

feels detached, isolated, selfish, wilfully blind. With no end

in sight (except the end of the planet) I let it peter out 

in a mess of confusion, incomplete, unresolved….

[Revised 3 July -24. Earlier draft posted 17 April.]