The Trooping Of The Colour And The Changing Of The Guard Poem by Tony Jolley

Evening greeted night with a butterfly kiss
So soft it’d make the angels jealous.

Colour gave way
Gradually,
Reluctantly,
Yet as gracefully as
The final, fingertip leaving-longings
Of parting lovers,
Where the fading traces of together
Still tingle and teeter
Upon an intangible high-wire
Strung insubstantially
Between two and one,
Between there and gone.

Shifting twilight tones of shade and shadow
Insinuating themselves silently
Into each and every corner
Colour had so carefully colonised
Since its morning victory over dark’s nocturnal hegemony: -

An eternal, natural, changing of the guard –
Not so much Buckingham as Bonoty.


NB. Bonoty = Mas la Bonoty, a lovely little 8 x bedroom converted farmhouse hotel in the Vaucluse, south of France. Sat there on the verandah one evening being served a lovely dinner and watching the light fade slowly from the sky and candlelight take over.