Tom’s Reunion Dinner

The large and paunchy man,

with straddled legs and slippered feet,

paddling across a hotel floor

to sit because he cannot stand,

evokes the picture I recall

of a clumsy boy of eighteen years

who lives within his image still,

his slow, intelligent, sickly smile

the ponderous speech,

head tilted to one side

in the same evasive way.

Professor of Mathematics now,

married and widowed,

his cup is otherwise full.

Asked once at school how life

would ravel out, his mind was clear.

The Latin manuscripts of Newton

sufficed him for a lifetime.

And so they have. Academia

crowns his balding head,

paraphernalia weighing more

with him, no doubt, than many

increments of flesh.

He never shunned his origins,

the poverty of his home,

the red-brick terraced house,

fronting the street. No garden,

but a garden flowers in his mind

alongside Newton, Virgil, Horace

and the memory of Class Five,

the boys - professors, jokers,

bankers, lawyers and deceased -

whom we revive an hour or more,

in the lees of our reunion year.

©Terry Hodgson2003