A Parting Poem by Aisle Walton

A Parting
i.m. Nina Levick

You: our happy dose for three days in the week,
PowerPoint demon and whiteboard supernova;
our frizzed and frozzling, bubbled spinning top
of Gothic arches and Diocletian windows,
and all the videos
of Simon Schama,
and the cries of
“Will you ever, will you ever! ”
at the sight of silky scarfs with shirts unbuttoned to the navel.

You: our pediment,
our exuberant triumphal arch;
two roundels sparkling with
each precious day of life that you were giving –
we didn’t know the cost until much later –
and trips to the National (Schama again) , and
all those times we didn’t put our hands up
(even though we knew the answer)
because that was the game,
and you would end up coaxing it from one of us
at tea-time parties (called ‘revision’) …
revision…revision…revision…

- - -

Some jokes and then it was over,
and I was half a doorway away;
all those clichés paraded
- imagined appropriate,
PVC for what was desperate to be real
when what was real had been
so the opposite of this, now.

Lines, carefully chosen,
a façade, clumsily woven.
Beethoven’s Moonlight was
minor enough to wallow in,
but the chords were never loud enough.