Today, 09 August 2024, is Day 614 of the daily poems. It ushers in our new Music theme – and it would have been Philip Larkin’s 102nd birthday had he not met his end at age 83. One of Larkin’s poems, “Aubade”, echoes the dawn song that greets the morning, but being Larkin he strikes a pessimistic note, lamenting the “sure extinction that we travel to / And shall be lost in always.” Our poet today, Walter Paul Kennedy, brings his own Larkinesque note to the plight of a lonely tuba …
The lonely tuba
The lonely tuba
Breathed its last
In the nineteen sixties
Once a valued member
Of Meredith’s Brass Band
In the nineteen fifties
Now all its friends are gone
Scattered throughout the world
Some boxed up in dusty attics
Others in the junkyard
The lucky few still
Tootling and parping
In swinging bands
While the lonely tuba
Bides its time
In the garden of the Sussex Arms
Dreaming of those west end times
The best of times
And they were the end times.
Walter Paul Kennedy