Tony Jolley Poems

The cenotaph sighs
Under weight of the words:
A marble-white marker
Bridging two worlds.
...

Pigtails.
She had pigtails.
Long pigtails:
Out of the ordinary pigtails,
...

He wasn’t carried from the ring
Upon shoulders of adulation and adoration.
He wasn’t paraded before the populace
As ‘Local Boy Made Good’.
...

Life.

It starts.
It ends.
...

Being One:

Neither
Dependent
...

They were suddenly all around me.
Every sense told me they were there.
Then they gathered me to them
As if the eye of History
...

Everything’s gone.

Everything’s gone tender,
gone soft,
...

Silent at first;
A duet danced and sung by eager eyes
Across a distance ineffectually imposed
By dining-table dimensions,
...

It lay incongruous:
At an angle oblique to its own belonging,
Languishing lonely between retreating tide
And the blind feet of the Good Friday beach brigade
...

The heavy amour rolled through my Poland late last night
Gouging and spurting flesh like mud under its tracks,
Scouring deep welts down my flanks,
Spitting out gristle, guts and gouts of blood
...