POEM OF THE DAY

THE distinguished poet Douglas Dunn’s rueful reflection on ageing is included in the Scottish Poetry Library’s Best Scottish Poems 2017, an online publication of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year.

REMEMBERING FRIENDS

WHO FEARED

OLD AGE AND DEMENTIA

MORE THAN DEATH

Even when just the other day

From Then to Now feels decades away. The name at the back of the mind… What can I say?

That memory’s fickle, that fretting

Over a lost name or forgotten month Makes you feel guilty, mindless, and blind,

That it’s perfectly natural to fear the labyrinth

Where the ‘ageing process’ might one day take you

Into the land of forgetting?

You said it, friends. Too true.

Dictionaries become indispensable? There’s an urge to reread the Bible?

That song was in what key?

Over the hill,

Round the corners, round the bends, And nuts to you, too, as I check my diary For wherever it is I’m supposed to be, Today, or the next, that old clock-sorcery I don’t depend on, though I know I should,

And which you overdid, old friends.

No, I don’t think you did,

Not now I’m older. No one

Looks forward to being old and alone, The carer with a spoon,

Visitor gone,

Boredom and fright on television.

How do you understand the merry young As you endure a dragging afternoon With a hundred names on the tip of your tongue,

Unable to cheer yourself up,

In a constant state of indecision? Cheers! Let’s pour another cup.

from The Noise Of A Fly

(London: Faber, 2017). Reproduced with the permission of the author.