All Saints
I still hear her every day.
Her voice is clear and strident.
Chastising, or cursing my frustration.
“Patience, Simon” whenever I have none.
Sometimes she’s just comforting and
I hear her laugh, or give her funny little sigh.
‘Thirty-three years dead,
But she’s still living in my head’,
As Johnny Flynn might have said.
All the nursery rhymes I know
Are spoken in her voice,
But her love of proverbs never chimed.
My Dad’s voice, I have to conjure though,
Washed gravel, fag-phlegmed.
Laughing made him cough, but he laughed a lot.
‘He’s been gone even longer,
But his laugh is so much stronger’,
As Johnny Flynn might have said.
But the biggest regret is this,
I wish she’d met my kids just once,
And told them her stories, proverbs too.
They never got to know her voice that
I still hear, unbidden.
And would have gained so much from that.
‘Pray for the people inside your head
For they won’t be there when you’re dead’, *
As Johnny Flynn once said.
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