FIRST DATE

Walking behind you – your chignon, your tanned

forearms, your calves, your white, pleated skirt

swaying,  just the suggestion of that

bottom – into a sunlit pub on

Wenlock Edge for gin and orange and a pint;

 

watching Macbeth through inexorable

drizzle in a Shropshire market town –

‘It will be rain tonight’. ‘Let it come down’;

 

drying off in another pub, hearing

someone recite Housman loudly:

‘When smoke stood up from Ludlow…;’

 

driving home, your sleeping head on my shoulder,

your future already in my hands – nearly

two generations ago.

 

 

 

 

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3 Comments
  • Steve Crewe
    July 5, 2016

    Beautifully painted, David – memories from days gone by that enrich the tapestry of advancing years.

  • Keith Johnson
    July 4, 2017

    If the pub was the Longville Hotel you may have been served by my uncle Ron Clarke!

    • David Selzer
      July 5, 2017

      My heart says the pub was on the Edge itself. My head says it was somewhere south of Shrewsbury on the A49. Also I wasn’t driving. My blind date and I were back seat passengers in a friend’s car – and not interested in the geography! (And that’s probably another poem). But the rest of the piece is factually accurate – events that took place exactly fifty six years ago this Monday gone.