Last Draft

From the age of 50 onwards, as if following in the spirit of Larkin's The View, Green's poetry became increasingly morose and, although he kept on trying, it received even less critical acclaim than it had before.

-these lines taken from a future academic who resorted to me as his subject because all other poetry had been discussed to a standstill.

Last Draft

It’s no use. The past is now a spendthrift
friend, islands in a grey lagoon bereft
of such tricks as sorcery or witchcraft
or alchemy. It had promised a gift
of remembrance that, it said, you could lift
anything from, like that starburst festschrift
one very nearly wrote or Vermeer’s Delft
pictured after soft rain. But it was theft.

It never explained exactly how swift
it would be in making its move to shift
its ground and leave one derelict, adrift
upon a future that you were too daft
to see would leave you on a homespun raft
counting your good luck and whatever’s left.