A couple of poems I wrote a while ago

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players”
As You Like It, Shakespeare

Waiting in the wings of the world
Standing, watching, waiting for my turn to come:
Straining eagerly to hear my cue.
Yet it’s always the bridesmaid and never the bride
As I stand in the quiet and the dust,
Waiting in the wings of the world
For my time to come.

Once I too was out there on the stage of life,
Playing my part,
Taking for granted the bright, easy companionship in the limelight of being alive.
Now I stand alone in the shadows, a part-lit, part-life.

They are so near and yet my body cannot cross the gulf.
Life is close enough to touch and yet unreachable.
Yet my day must come, when I too will slip back onto the stage
And take my part once more?

For now I am waiting in the wings of the world
Surrounded by the ghosts of what once was
And what is to be.

(07/02/07)

And another from that same month:

Another minute another stitch
In another row of many other rows.

Another hour another row
While interminable indistinguishable tinned laughter
Accompanies indiscernible mediocre actors
On their futile adventures behind the dusty glass.

Another day and it’s the same
And so they silently slip past
Until another week sneaks away
Measurable only in inches of rows of stitches.

So I’ll sit and knit while the days drone by
And watch the repeat of a repeat
Of a programme first aired in 1972
But it’s better than silence.

(17/02/07)