I'd been out the night before & hadn't seen the papers or the telly <br />& the next day in a café someone told me you were dead <br />And it was as if a favourite distant uncle had died <br />old hands in the big strange room/new shiny presents at Christmas <br />and I didn't know what to feel. <br /> <br />For years I measured out my life with your coffee spoons <br /> <br />Your poems on the table in dusty bed sitters <br />Playing an L.P. of you reading on wet interrupted January afternoons <br /> <br />Meanwhile, back at the Wasteland: <br />Maureen OHara in a lowcut dress staggers across Rhyl sandhills <br />Lovers in Liverpool pubs eating passion fruit <br />Reading Alfred de Vigny in the lavatory <br />Opening an old grand piano and finding it smelling of curry <br />THE STAR OF INDIA FOUND IN A BUS STATION <br />Making love in a darkened room hearing an old woman having a fit on the landing <br />The first snowflakes of winter falling on her Christmas poem for me in Piccadilly Gardens <br />The first signs of spring in plastic daffodils <br />on city counters <br /> <br />Lovers kissing <br />Rain fallin <br /> <br />Dogs running <br />Night falling <br />And you `familiar compound spirit' moving silently down Canning St in a night of rain and fog.<br /><br />Adrian Henri<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/poem-in-memoriam-t-s-eliot/
