A Poem For Today - One Year On

[KEN DICKINSON]



For our dear friend David who left us 1 year ago today

One Year On

If I were to write to you today

I’d have to start by bringing you up to date

Telling you the outcome of last year’s vote

And all the shit that’s come down as a consequence

But I gag on all that, and besides it’s 

Nothing you really need to know

I’d rather say how much we’re missing you and will miss you

When Thanksgiving rolls around again,

The second one you’re going to miss,

Though it’s really we who will miss you.

One thing that we’re not going to miss

Are those cheap-assed little cakes you 

Used to pick up at the 7-11 enroute to chez nous.

More welcome was the rumpled page

You’d pull from a back pocket to read us,

In a manner honed by a history of addressing 

crowds: your latest poem.

We’ll also miss our walk to Solano

For a Thanksgiving meal of Indian, Thai or Chinese food

And our walk back home again,

Sometimes via that place with the henhouse in the front

Where a quarter in a slot got you a bit of chicken feed.

(Your love of animals was always unsurpassed.)

And into this calculus of loss,

I have to add the movies that we watched 

When we got home, though agreement on a title

 Meant we often deferred to your politicized choice,

 Which was always, of course, right on.

You were, after all, our guest.

Come to think of it, our Thanksgivings went all the way back

To that time on Laidley when we did acid 

And couldn’t really eat the turkey we’d cooked,

But danced to the soundtrack of “Black Orpheus,”

Playing it over and over again, as Bonnie tugged at her hair.

But that was more than fifty years ago.

In recent decades it was you, me, and Mary:

Mary, with whom you always wanted to talk,

You said as much yourself, but no problem there for me, 

My friend, as she remains the world’s greatest listener, 

Bar none. But as long as we’re being honest, brother, I have

to say 

I was a little disappointed with the state of some of the

Things we found on our sad visit to your empty house—

Paintings and CDs and books—I’d given you over the years,

As though you’d thrown the lot of them down a well!

Oh, well, I wasn’t meant to find them, I suppose.

I was older and wasn’t supposed to outlast you.

Besides which you were never big on things

Except for books, hundreds of books, that you bragged you had 

never read.

And though I knew I wouldn’t find you in that line of

Noise-making citizens at the Israeli Consulate last week,

I could imagine the epithet you might have tossed at us

As we dashed by on our way to a North Beach lunch.

And now for every part of you that I recall and even those I 

can’t,

I miss the lot.

by Al Sandine

[John Jai Conley]

Jahrzeit. Ah, bless you, beautiful brother.

Thank you.

And thank you, Ken.

🙏🏼❤️

Jai

The way you look at things is the most powerful force in shaping your life.

John O’Donohue

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