Twenty Years Down - (The Beatles) Poem by David Lewis Paget

All you left were your plastic pieces
Cloaked in covers of light and sound,
Whatever happened to spill our leases,
Wreck our passage and check our treaties
Twenty years down?

Often I’ve thought of the way you made it
Poked your tongues at the hand-me-downs,
Sang your songs of the maid, and laid it
Track on track, and the way you played it
Close to the ground.

And we all laughed at your small perfection
Simple lads in a world of wine,
We caught the spell of your sweet confections,
Song on song of your funny mentions
Of you, of me and mine.

The world was well that you had your way in,
Nobody hurt, or suffered or lost,
Nothing we thought that we had no say in,
Love was the word that we thought to play in
That took no count of the cost.

But now your shadows lie dim within us
And every laugh has a shattered sound,
Left to the rest of our lives, we spin us
Ever the wake of the dream that in us
Ran aground!

12 June 1984