The Last Hurrah
 

 
Age scored faces and grizzled hippy hair
gives The Eagles the look of Sioux elders now.
But their sound still reaches the same sweet spot.
And Joe Walsh still whips up the crowd with wild riffs.
I notice you wipe away tears as if in a winter wind,
These are the last; we’ll never see the like again.
 
The music scratches your memory, too.
Specifically, the endless summer of 76,
spent on Whitstable beach, with crates of beer and mates.
Long hair petted by biker groupies; tee shirts cast off
until October, Jeans amputated to make shorts.
Transistor playing non-stop; Cream, The Who, Deep Purple.
 
We both shrug at today’s bands that are sensible
as school prefects, leave hotel rooms as they found them,
do not wear motley but beige that serves to camouflage on stage.
So, no Freddy Mercury flamboyance or Mick Jagger
antics in performance, and music that seems to lament
‘all the best songs have already been taken’.
 
Original baby-faced bands reckoned ‘Rock’ would only last
‘a couple of years’. True, some only managed mayfly careers
before joining the 27 club, but others, like Lemmy, just managed
to tag their seventies until that hit man year took out so many.
So, we have streamed up Wembley way, old tour T-shirts
straining over paunches, for a last chance to see this band
 
who, like clever gamblers, knew when to fold
their Rock lifestyle. Now, arms around waists,
heads on shoulders, we harmonise:
Desperado, Tequila Sunrise, Best of My Love,
songs that, like musical snap shots, jog memories
of lost friends, lovers, in this, Rock’s last hurrah.

Fiona Sinclair

If you have any thoughts about this poem,  Fiona Sinclair would be pleased to hear them