To Robbie (1966)
Scruffy should have been his name.
Hairy, scarey, Funny lad.
His flabby jaws,
Great soft paws,
And other things
[...]
She wears a robe of lavender lace (1964)
She wears a robe of lavender lace
Which covers all except her face
And pretty shoulders lean and bare.
(...)
Homework
I see the paper-stack of white.
I see the gentle drip of ink.
I see the pile of paper-backs.
I hear the silence cut the night.
[...]
Preface
My poems deal with the generation gap, with loneliness, youth and old age (although I was only a teenager at the time of writing them), with fear of conformity, fear to show true feelings, the fear of getting older, relationships, and, of course, love.
I say “of course”, because so many poems and songs deal with the theme of love. This is perhaps the strongest emotion that we can feel and thus it seems easier, logical even, that we write about it. I think when a feeling is so strong, the writing just pours out of the pen! In fact the words have often to be written down fast, otherwise the word flow will stow and the memory of those overflowing words will be lost forever, even before reaching the paper. I can on more than one occasion remember sitting up in bed in the night to jot down notes for a poem that came to mind. If I hadn’t done so, these thoughts, lines of poetry, would have been gone for ever. I was somewhere between 16 and 20 years of age when writing these poems. An excellent age to feel emotion intensively, and to write about it! The poems are divided roughly into four phases: my school time, a school trip on a coach to Switzerland, my student phase in Devon (South England) and a journey to India (also on a coach – one of 20 coaches with other students to India). The last poem “Tomorrow I will sparkle” first seems to show life’s journey going in an optimistic direction. But then, why should I sparkle tomorrow? Why not here and now? What is up? We don’t get to know what has happened to have to put the optimistic emphasise only on the future.
[...]
