for David Brooks
Nothing for weeks, no urgent need,

no jolt. Instead, I sit in a café reading,

only occasionally looking up to see

students wearing expensive

headphones, as they text or talk

on their mobiles. I think about my life,

nothing much is ever truly planned,

so much just fallen into. But there’s pleasure

in the sometimes lonely drift, the tender

space between the trees as I remember

the old man sitting under the pawlonias

on his rush seat in the winter sun,

gathering poems and holding a cup

of treasured wine – occasionally looking

through his round gate at the bare trees

and at boys walking the muddied lane

beyond his walls – richer lads chattering

in groups and picking up their robes

to save their silks, poorer ones in workers’

drab cloth, arms tanned by the sun

of the sorghum fields. They laugh and chatter

sharing secrets as they drudge or pick

their way through mud and dung, oblivious

to the old poet, tying a red, deliberate ribbon

around his sheath of poems. 
The title, ‘No poem for weeks now’ is borrowed from a poem in David Brooks’s collection Open House.