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The Dancefloor.

My mother posts me a photograph,
sandwiched in her careful cardboard:
today it's Porridge Oats. She's scissored
Daz and Kellogg's Cornflakes packs
as back-up to ensure her mail arrives
uncracked; protection for the past. Dad looks

the eldest in a group of brylcreemed lads
all in their suits, their teens, their innocence.
They laugh into the camera, except
for Dad: his shrapnel stare refracts the lens
beyond the dancefloor, the last bus home,
towards a world at war. His friends are dead,
preserved in sepia-stained monochrome,
exhumed from their cut-out coffin,
soon to be framed on a living room wall.

Dear Andrew ~

This really speaks to our times, especially at Christmas. You set it in its own time so effectively through its details. Non-sentimental and very moving. I love reading your careful work. Thanks.

~ Elizabeth

Dear Tom,
What is the source of your quote? I haven't a clue.
Andrew.

It a quote from the poem "Byzantium" written by W. Yeats.

Andrew McGeever wrote:Dear Tom,
What is the source of your quote? I haven't a clue.
Andrew.

Sorry, Andrew, for not giving clearer references (who, after all, ever looks at the topic line of a post?) to Yeats. But another poem of yours, the one where you meet Lorca and Yeats on a train, made me read Yeats again.

I believed the cryptic response was less cryptic than it proved to be. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Due to a bad selection as my only source for WBY I had always thought of him as an over-estimated poet, but re-reading his poems after a few decades, and from a different source, I can see he's a giant.

I owe this revelation to you. Thanks.

Tom

Dear Tom,
You wrote, " another poem of yours, the one where you meet Lorca and Yeats on a train, made me read Yeats again".
That was my "Poetry's for Poofs", which needs some explanation to anyone who doesn't come from Scotland or understands the double importance of Carstairs. Anyway, it was just a magical mystery tour, the poem, of course.
Returning to "The Dancefloor", your quote from W.B. Yeats touched (by accident ?) an artery of the poem. I am grateful to you and others for the replies.
One of my critics questioned the title: we discussed it and I defended my position; the title stands. I haven't read "The Dancefloor" and am not sure how to read it, but I'll let you know how it went, once it's done.
Andrew.

Andrew McGeever wrote:That was my "Poetry's for Poofs", which needs some explanation to anyone who doesn't come from Scotland or understands the double importance of Carstairs.

Dear Andrew,

I reckon you're talking about Carstairs Junction where the Glasgow trains meet those from Carlisle and Carstairs State Hospital which is probably the most (in)famous "secure psychiatric care facility" in all of Scotland and Ulster...

Cheers
tom

Dear Tom,
Last week I read "The Dancefloor" (and "Soon"). Both went down well with the audience ( at least that's what they said). Someone bought me a pint of Guinness; said I'd done them well.
The Dancefloor is slow; "Soon" is faster.
I'll do better next time, but it's a relief to know that both are out!
Andrew.

i think "sailing to byzantium" is the better poem, even though he seems quite hopeful and bitter in it at the same time. one of my favorite lines:

"Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is"