Tony Jolley Poems

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

No foregone conclusions
No faites accomplis
No ducking of decisions
No get-out-of-jail-frees;
...

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
...