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i.m. M.I.

In that profound dull tunnel long since scooped
By ex-prop-forwards down on their luck, he stood
(Its concrete walls and floor pock-marked and spattered
By the ten thousand muddy boots that clattered
Past to death or glory…). His shirt was hooped
In blue and white, but had a kind of hood

That shaded his face, and like his shorts it hung
From a body so far wasted, it was bones.
I tried to speak, but what came out were groans.
‘Jenks!’ he grinned. ‘What, you here? Haven’t you heard?’
(His voice was quiet and clear, not one word slurred),
‘This game’s for those whose lyres have come unstrung,

Whose frames likewise. In line-out and in scrum
We are shadows of our former selves; we pass
As shadows through each other on the grass.
We are past pain, the knocks and shocks and bruises
And breakages we knew up there, that come,
To whom this kind of unarmed combat chooses,

As campaign-medals—much-decorated,
Once, I lose strength now, and my turn of speed
On the wing has left me. Out-accelerated
By any jeering schoolboy, I limp back in
For ghost-beers at the bar we park our lack in
When living souls have all gone home to feed.

Your sport, I know, was tennis, and your shame
To wear your father’s baggy khaki shorts
Among the white-clad ones on the tennis-club courts—
Well, you showed them, the sniggering well-heeled.
But how are things, up there? Is my name
Still heard among the veterans of this field,

And those by whom the language lives (ahem)?
Or has it faded like the morning dew?’
‘Mick, old warrior’, I managed, ‘if you knew—
We shouldered you as team-mates might have done,
The whole back-biting bard-tribe rose as one
To honour you: tributes that honoured them.

The laurels you had worked for, hard and long,
Are yours. We talk of “Cockney” and “Past Caring”,
Of those forgotten facts—cruel or wrong—
You made your work from, and our lives become…
I’m not sure, now, that what I feel’s for “sharing”—’
(A boy who loved his football and his mum,

I thought perhaps that I could understand,
That need in both of us, to shine, to star—
More shyly manifest in you than me…
The day you died, I’d been in the “Friend in Hand”—
Although I wasn’t that, not latterly.
I couldn’t face you, couldn’t face how far,

How fast…) ‘Old warrior! Remember that?
And you, myself and Reading in my flat,
Shouting into a squeaky tape-recorder,
The climax of a poem he’d perform
Full-tilt in Earls Court Square (went down a storm)?
As drunk as lords, as loud as Harry Lauder’—

‘A long way from fishing with your dad, and girls,
And team sports—as these are from the lone pursuit
Of verse. But we are all formed, more or less,
Before we stand, before we’ve lost our curls—
Or so we’re told; and then we’re left to guess
At how’—he bent down to unlace a boot—

‘How the game will end.’ (And yours brought this twist,
That after all those nights we spent in pubs,
Two leaders in the drinking race who missed
The point, staying up all hours, smoking stubs,
You found your proper life, only to lose it
At half-time. Whether or not we use it,

Etc…) ‘Let us sleep now…’