At the Eleventh Hour
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Full Moon on a Cloudy Night
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Greeting My Grandfather
At the Eleventh Hour
Mary's Sang
The Funeral
Pyatknowe
My Faither's Words
Fallen Angel
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Quean for a Day
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A Winter Dawn
Men at Work
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On Biggar Pond
Elegy
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Yr Wyddfa
Thelma Cann
Old Acquaintance
Philip Pullman
The Dooble Rainbae
Ten Haiku from Whitecastle Hill
Tanka
Medwyn Below Greenshields
Sclimbin the Knock
Gled
Whaup Eggs
Socrates
Wha made this road?
Snow

He was living on borrowed time,

he used to say

from the Olympus of his seventy-seven winters.

He'd already had his alloted three score years and ten,

and now he lived on the crumbs gathered

from the bread broken in the trenches of the Somme

and scattered over No-Man’s Land.

 

And at remembrance time

he would commemorate them fiercely,

clinging tenaciously to the faces and voices that

animated his days, as if to his own life,

feeling the melt of their Eucharist on his tongue.

And on such days, he would sip at his tea

harshly, as if he were drinking their blood.

 

For sixty years he had kept this communion,

kept faith with them and life itself.

And on the day he died,

emptying the ashes from the firestep of his hearth,

glancing round the faces for the very last time,

he cast into the air his last remaining handful of crumbs.

We shall gather and remember them.