Adrian Henri: Poem in Memoriam T. S. Eliot

Poem in Memoriam T. S. Eliot – TheTLS

I’d been out the night before – hadn’t seen the papers or the telly
& the next day in a cafe someone told me you were dead
And it was as if a favourite distant uncle had died
old hands in the big strange room/new shiny presents at Christmas
and I didn’t know what to feel.

For years I measured out my life with your coffeespoons
Your poems on the table in dusty bedsitters
Playing an LP of you reading on wet interrupted January afternoons.

Meanwhile, back at The Wasteland:
Maureen O’Hara in a lowcut dress staggers across Rhyl sandhills
Lovers in Liverpool pubs eating passionfruit
Reading Alfred de Vigny in the lavatory
Opening an old grand piano and finding it smelling of curry
THE STAR OF INDIA FOUND IN A BUS STATION
Making love in a darkened room hearing an old woman having a fit on the landing
The first snowflakes of winter falling on her Christmas poem for me
in Piccadilly Gardens
The first signs of spring in plastic daffodils
on city counters

Lovers kissing
Rain falling

Dogs running
Night falling

And you, familiar compound spirit, moving silently down Canning St.
on a night of rain and fog.

ADRIAN HENRI (Liverpool, 1965)