Day, year and century hang by a spider's thread

Michael Hamburger

i.m. Adrian Henri

Shortest day. The city's streets awoke, put on their clichés,

muffled themselves in hope, muttered over cups of tea

about the hard year's turn-around,

gloom ending, things looking up;

then heard on air your heart had stopped.

Different clichés would be worn, less comfortably, that day;

obituaries taken down from hangers like dark suits,

drawers rummaged through for memories and words –

like genuine, honest, popular – to deck you out,

make ready in Sunday-suit for church: our Liverpool Poet

conspicuous for the common touch – headlines that only really say

you were soppy like the rest of us and understood

the city's hard-knock swagger's chocolate truffle underneath.

We shipshape time into significance, map memories, forge

somethings out of the nothings of coincidence, hoard ironies,

buy shares in hope. I suppose, like me, you wondered

as a snotty-nose if you would still be knocking round

at the Millennium? Once it seemed whimsical possibility,

a just-about. We made it though. I can tell you now

eighteen years ago I cringed knowing you were fifty and I

was forty-six, thinking the happy days over, you

a grey-haired hippy, still somehow wowing girls with pop

and roses, waking to find knickers twisted in the sheets.

I would have liked another chance – picking at the scabby underside

of some hospital bedside chair – to chat with you –

fidgeting with my cuticles, bringing grapes,

say things I'm saying here in a sort of gentle bantering Scouse

hoping to tease you back to something more familiar than

the wordless otherness of tubes and drips, the bouncing bleep

that all too often flops into a fatal drone, ends someone's hope.

World keeps on confronting us with its too-late, too-late.

What inverted sentimentalists we Scousers are!

You won't remember now the way things seemed to start: that night

the music (nearly) died: Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens,

spinning through snow like a sycamore seed to crash on rockhard

ground, oh, boy; nor the night Bill Haley rattled and shook

the walls of black St George's Hall, when adolescents became

teenagers and thought it time to strut and strum their lives away…