Age Rage
I was wandering through the Nursing Home
In the town of Morton Rise,
Seeking an old and weathered face
That I'd known in another guise,
For Richard Spratt was my father's friend
That I hadn't seen for years,
I was going to let him know his friend
Had taken a turn for the worse.
The eyes that stared from the armchairs there
Were blank, and devoid of pain,
They'd taken the pills that dulled them down
So they wouldn't be restrained,
The nurses treated them all as fools
This gross humanity,
Whose only sin was they'd given in
To age, and infirmity.
It was all so very depressing, I
Imagined my future there,
Staring in immobility
From the prison of one of their chairs,
Waiting my turn to be spoon-fed
By a very impatient nurse,
Who shovelled the food all over my chin
As I sat, and inwardly cursed.
I wandered the home there, room by room
In search of his friendly face,
This Richard Spratt in a cricketer's hat
I remembered from Ambergate,
He'd batted a decent fifty, while
My father polished the ball,
And took five wickets alone that day
In his bowling, over all.
It was nigh on forty years before
That I'd watched them play as a child,
Out on the green at Ambergate
With the weather, warm and mild,
But the years dismay as they pass away
And my father grew so old,
Now he lay in bed in a kind of dread
As the bell of his lifetime tolled.
I said that I'd find his friend for him
And let him know, at the last,
That he was remembered, thick and thin
For a friendship, forged in the past,
There were days when they both had sunny skies
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poem by David Lewis Paget
Added by Poetry Lover
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