MAX FATCHEN’S FINAL VIEW
NOT QUITE THE END
This is my last regular verse for The Advertiser. So rip off a bundle of tissues and join our play at that moody manor to our north. The scene is a garden shed where the old jester is putting away his cap and bells under the scrutiny of his dame.
Jester: Old bards must quit and leave the noisy stage
Where breakfast fans will butter-drip their page
With morning toast; but homage now must close
Old birds must fly, old thorns forsake their rose.
Dame: Take heart, good sire, the cheerful hours will go
The rake is ready and the sharpened hoe.
The spade alert, and seedlings in their pails
To work, to work and tallyho the snails.
Jester: I catalogued each day, the city’s hope
Or washed its face with operatic soap.
Or chronicled the country cousins soil
Or brought the academic to the boil
With lines that limped and yet were still well meant
The chapter close and fold the sage’s tent
Dame: Upon another mission let us skip
To rim the vine while walloping the thrip
We’ll bring your waist within more sparing span
Till Cassius would cry. “So lean a man”
Jester: Yet once they quoted me and made reports,
“On him, he writes a poetry of sorts,
“A lesser bard, and now that you enquire
“His bosom’s stirred and by a modest fire.”
Dame: But Shakespeare went and so did Shelley, Keats
For Tyrant Time our lime plans defeats
So come with me, before the sunset’s glow
There’s hedge to him and spacious lawn to mow.
Jester: I had imagined some quiet jetty’s plank
With fisher folk and bait box, rank on rank.
The tangy air, the passing damsel’s glance
To sleep perhaps to dream.
Dame: Fat chance.
We’ll bend the back. As tortured lungs will breathe
We’ll make the heavy humus lift and seethe
And when tis done, for day is all too brief,
We then retire to cheese and lettuce leaf.
Jester: But you out there beyond this printed word,
I loved you all and when Time’s Tea is stirred
And human frailty sombrely debunked,
Remember me when morning biscuit’s dunked
Dame: Away, away there’s never time like NOW
With seeds astir, the sap is on the bough.
Jester: Poor sap indeed where nectars are denied
And boats convivial embrace the tide.
So goodbye, Mr Quips. And sound a knell.
Old poets fade and maybe just as well!
Max Fatchen