Recumbent, He Looks Down
 
The room is Spartan, windowless and small.
A clock is making faces on the wall.
Left alone, until the doctor comes
to catalogue my history and symptoms,
I fall to contemplation of my feet,
my comely ankles and my slender calves,
that have conducted me through Skye and Crete
to Etna’s slopes and San Francisco’s wharves.
And then my shoes, each one a battered friend
that might go with me to the world’s end,
and then I think about them on the day
they will go on without me, in a way.
(And yes, how sadly typical of me,
these intimations of morbidity.)

David Callin


If you have any thoughts about this poem,  David Callin   would be pleased to hear them