Valentine

I spoil you, I really do. Only four months since presenting the world with a whole booklet of poems - 14 of them in all, here's another one already. And that makes two if you count A Departure from last Autumn. I'm not sure either will make the final selection for whatever book comes next but at least you can see I'm trying my best.

I've been looking through Sophie Hannah's poems with a view to her Top 6. Very witty, most amusing and with adept use of rhyme schemes, I found it hard to differentiate between them in the end, with the exception of The Cancellation, which would be my favourite. It also slightly worried me in her last book that even though she is now, according to the internet, married with children, her poems are still concentrating on settling old scores with feckless, inadequate ex-boyfriends. Nevertheless, having read so many of them, the virus catches and I found myself doing a similar thing. Not the same, though. This poem has a happier outcome.

So, with apologies to Sophie Hannah,

Valentine

She said I'd sent a valentine
to her some years before
but the occasion had slipped my mind.
I denied it and swore

that it wasn't me, I never did
but the next time we went out
she showed me it. Heaven forbid,
it was my writing, no doubt,

badly disguised, but nonetheless
it had to be from me.
It wasn't very hard to guess,
it was - obviously.

So I had to admit
writing that statement of intent
and, when I come to think of it,
it was money well spent.