Latest poem

So it's now 21 done out of 30 and the downhill stretch for NaPoWriMo. Today's is a nostalgic poem and as in so many cases, I'm not quite sure where this poem beamed in from.

I hope you had a good weekend.

Keep writin' and recitin'

Mark x
 
Ten o’ clock in the seventies
 
When Dad was not on a later finish,
it was his ritual; cup of tea and
a taste of something sweet watching the news,
as if he needed the world’s worst problems
as well as his own to chase him to sleep.
 
I would have been ushered upstairs by then,
each night stretching bed time to breaking point.
Sometimes I’d break curfew, watching the news,
staying mouse quiet curled on the carpet
as fingers of fire massaged my back.
 
Inventor of bullet points, News at Ten
or so it seems to me with each Big Ben
BONG announcing the world’s next misery;
Ask not for whom the bell tolls. Wise man, Donne
to foresee that from the sixteen hundreds.
 
Most nights, I heard the distant E major
from bed, the dot of the bell, the dash of
the headlines indistinct through doors and brick.
This moment anchors me in time, in place,
in family, secure until morning.