Category: Loss

On By jovisgoesIn Loss, LoveLeave a comment

…and yet when finally I drew back the curtain, life was still there ticking away as always. For in truth, ‘time really does wait for no one’. My self-all-absorbing grief, is only a very small pothole along the much larger global road of life. I don’t care, it is my pothole.

I touch her things, my fingers gently passing over her wedding ring and her watch, both of which she had worn every day since we had married some forty eight years earlier. It has been four months since she was stolen away from me, she was taken away in an ambulance and I never saw her again. Even worse I never got to speak to her again. That is what I miss most of all, I will never hear her voice again. It could be, ‘can you pass me the butter knife please?’ or ‘have you read this article in the paper?’ or ‘I love you.’ I will never hear her say anything again. That breaks my heart.

Potholes get repaired but I am like the local council and their repair schedule, I will take forever.

A new life…

On By jovisgoesIn Death, Life, Loss, Love, peace1 Comment

And so they gave her chamomile
To restore her sense of calm
But each and every person there
Saw pointlessness in balm.
She would now always live in fear
He’d died, she was on her own
And she who’d lived a fragile life
Would spend her days alone.

And live she did, surprising most
A new life she took to
Her past fragility she shook off
In fact she even flew.
Around the world she travelled
To countries far and wide
And everywhere she journeyed
His heart felt by her side.
Until at almost ninety-nine
She then called it a day
Whilst jumping from an aeroplane
She kept her chute in stay.
But those who jumped out with her
Saw her face was so sublime
She shouted she was going now
To join him, it’s now time.
And so she fell down to the ground
Though gently she did fall
Carried down to earth in peace
As if held by her lover’s thrall.

©Joe Wilson – A new life…2015

The choice…

On By jovisgoesIn Family, Fear, Life, Loss, Love, Poetry, The end-game, The World, Thoughts, Time, War, wisdom4 Comments

Everywhere that he ever went
He always travelled in style
With supple leather and cocktail bar
He sat in the rear for mile upon mile.

He traded this, he traded that
Till finally he didn’t care
It was weapons he sold, they were deadly
To him in war, all things were fair.

And then one day he got the chance
To choose twixt loss or gain
Some men kidnapped his family
He had never felt such pain.

The ransom when it came was surprising
There was just one simple demand
Stop all of the sales of your weapons
Including those already planned.

For him the choice was so easy
He turned from the cocktail haze
Now he writes of love and of romance
With his family near, life finally pays.

©Joe Wilson – The choice…2015

By dawn’s early light…

On By jovisgoesIn Belief, Death, Eternity, Ethereal, Faith, Fate, Fear, Life, Loss, Love, PoetryLeave a comment

I wish that I could see the dawn
That follows the one of my demise
For I could then tell all of you
If ‘there’ beyond is truth or lies.

And if I did see dawn it’s true
That to a better place we go
But if I don’t see that new dawn
Then I could never let you know.

And so your journey you will make
Some with husband, some with wife
And you will find out for yourself
If there  exists that better life.

©Joe Wilson – By dawn’s early light…2015

We thought we were indestructible…

On By jovisgoesIn Illness, Life, Loss, Love, old age, Poetry, political, Poverty, Poverty, Survival, Thoughts, TimeLeave a comment

We thought we were indestructible
That the world was ours to grasp
It was clear it was the old ‘n’  incorrigible
Who’s breath came out in a rasp.
 

And so we lived our comfortable lives
Thinking mainly of ourselves and our own
Getting the best cars to fit in our drives
Making certain our lawns were all mown.
 

We only applied for the very top posts
Believing, as we did, we’re the best
Entertaining bosses as such perfect hosts
We really were promotion obsessed.
 

Then one of you is ill, you’re pulled up dead short
It makes you evaluate your life
You start to resent being one of your sort
The thought cuts your soul like a knife.
 

As time passes by you realise you do care
At the way of the world and the hurt
The way that the rich have far more than their share
While others look for food in the dirt.
 

Perhaps though, most of us go through this change
When the blinkers finally fall from the eyes
We recognise that apathy is wrong and so strange
It’s the time we start hearing sufferer’s cries.
 

Soon your own health gets you into the time-frame
Where your sneezes and wheezes start to count
And you worry that things will never be the same
And are you warm and eating the right amount!
 

You realise you’re far from indestructible
As your breath come out in a rasp
But for you life is ever so precious
And you’ll hang on with your dying gasp.

 
©Joe Wilson – We thought we were indestructible…2015

Moving on…

On By jovisgoesIn carelessness, Children, Family, Friendship, Life, Loss, Love, Poetry, Point of View, Regret, TimeLeave a comment

Thinking back now, knowing it wasn’t then the same
Sex lives free and easy and the rest just a game
But recalling the names of my friends from back then
I find they’re so few now and I miss those young men
And I bless that I knew them as I take up my pen.

It was a time they called ‘swinging’ in the press of the day
But those of us there at the time just made hay
As we carelessly staggered through our wild teenage years
Racing round in cars with bad brakes and crunched gears
Till we arrived at adulthood and took on new fears.

Some of us got married and our lives felt complete
A few drowned in alcohol and lived on the street
While others tripped out just that one time too many
On the drugs that were freely available to so many
You literally could get them at ten for a penny.

But most of us moved on and we raised families
With mortgages or rent life was no social whizz
And our children carried hopes for things we’d failed to do
Such an ordinary tale that reflects me or you
But it all helps to bind us together like glue.

Now we find ourselves older and wiser perhaps
Managing to sidestep some of lifetime’s worst traps
And we pause for a moment and think of those days
Many of them spent in a drug-induced haze
And we’d not change a thing, we just shifted our gaze.

©Joe Wilson – Moving on…2015

The Fall…

On By jovisgoesIn Accidents, Children, Family, Father, Fear, Illness, Life, Loss, Love, Poetry, Regret, TimeLeave a comment

I fell from the top of a tall block of apartments.

How I remember my children growing
and the never-ending beauty of my wife
my boy and my girl, so full of knowing
my darling, the centre of my humble life.

But the ground rushes up at me as I fly down so fast.

I’ve loved the same woman for all of my time
contented and happy and passionate are we
I remember the night full of vodka and lime
when I asked my love if she would marry me.

And still the ground races up at me…

What joy we have had on our long journey here
with some pains that we’ve shared and endured
sadness has crept in and occasional fear
but we beat it all back and we still feel assured.

I hit the ground — there is nowhere else to go…

Did I make it…did I not?
Was it a dream…was it not?

©The Executor acting for Joe Wilson – The Fall…2015

The numbers rise…

On By jovisgoesIn Belief, Corruption, Faith, Life, Loss, Pacifism, Poetry, political, Regret, so-called civilised, War1 Comment

Walked I along this Autumn morn
midst trees with bright red berries borne
where once men stood with with tanks as shields
on Europe’s bloodiest battlefields.

And in extraordinary Worldly War
friends kill friends who’re friends no more
as lines are drawn and power revealed
where once such things had lain concealed.

How many men and women died
for pious thoughts and national pride
whose wasted lives now lie beneath
that trampled o’er when we cross heath.

The bodies fall, the numbers rise
more victims of political lies
and yet some people still would fight
convinced that they are in the right.

Twas ever thus and shall remain
the populace feel power’s disdain
yet even now we fight their wars
with they as pimps and we their whores.

©Joe Wilson – The numbers rise…2015

Heads, you lose…

On By jovisgoesIn Accidents, carelessness, Driving, Fate, Life, Loss, Motorways, Poetry, Time1 Comment

Speeding along not a care in the world
the young man and his beautiful girl
driving in an open-topped E-type Jag
they were happy
………………………….and life was a whirl.

They were racing along the motorway
fast approaching Gravelly Hill
when a tanker jack-knifed in front of them
……….I can hear their screaming still.

They had nowhere to go but under
the trailer, however, was too low
and I, in a car a short distance back
saw both of their heads suddenly
…………………………………………………go.

One head rolled onto the hard shoulder
and sat there staring right back at me
while the other bounced over the railing
and fell into Witton
……………………………….for all there to see.

It put me off my lunch I can tell you
for that’s where I was going at the time
and if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s totally true
it would be a case of the ridiculous
……………………………….from the sublime.

 

©Joe Wilson – Heads, you lose…2015

The trawlerman’s wife & the 1953 spring-tide disaster…

On By jovisgoesIn Fate, Loss, Poetry, Survival, TimeLeave a comment
Flood
Mablethorpe 2 Feb 1953

 

A little dot of light in the distance
Signalled that they were on their way home
She was waiting at her own insistence
As the trawler drew closer through the foam.

Her man had taken another man’s place
And he sailed with yesterday’s tide
But their baby was due in only three days
She wanted him back on dry land by her side.

It caused her to reflect on her father
He’d been lost in the’53 spring tide
That had raced down the east coast of England
Brushing trawlers and ferries to one side.

They called it ‘The Big Flood’, it was really that bad
It happened unexpectedly
Two and a half thousand, including her dad
Were drowned and swallowed by the sea.

January thirty-first into February one
The storm raged like no other before
Then it turned out to sea and was suddenly gone
Leaving death and devastation in it’s maw.

The trawler was pulled into the harbour
And her husband jumped the jetty and ran
He took her into his arms and she worried no more
He was home, he was safe, and her man.

 

©Joe Wilson – The trawlerman’s wife & the 1953 spring-tide disaster…2015