Poetry Monday :: Someone we have met

Mimi of Messymimi's Meanderings and Diane of On the Border  are taking turns supplying us with a topic for this weekly endeavour. 
  They also both write wonderful, funny, thought-provoking, ingenious or simply honestly well written verse. Go and read.
   Jenny at Procrastinating Donkey is taking a break due to her husband's health issue. Let's continue  to send warm thoughts, good energy and lots of prayers their way.  

  This week Diane has given us Someone we have met. I have, as have we all, I suppose, met many people i n my life, I have even met many worth writing of, but when it comes to writing poetry, there's only one I can think of.  
  It is not the first time I have told about this poet on my blog. The impression he left on me is disproportionate to the time we spent together. Yes we spent - not many exactly, but far more than a few -  afternoons sitting at a table with a view to a pond. He with his beer, me with my chocolate milk. But he has had a big impact on my life, on my love of language and of writing poetry and stories. I still feel there's a debt to repay. 
I think I'll just have to repeat what I said in an old blog post: 

"... he was the poet of my youth. He was dubbed The Light Poet in his youth, but when I knew him in the years before his untimely death, he was a dark and - not bitter - but wronged man whit a big, red beard, gone wild and white. He drank too much, but talked more. I loved to listen to him, and only found out that he was a famous poet after he died and our local paper wrote an obituary praising him. Yes I was young and naïve, and he was a personality. I have the wan hope, that my unrequited admiration and my ignorance of his fame, may have been as much a consolation to him in these dark years as his company and poems were for me ..."

I once knew a poet, I thought he was old,
In his youth he was famous, I later was told.
 But now - as I said - he felt old as a tree,
His beard was all greying, so ... easy to see.
We met many times in the humble café
at the library, dark afternoons around three.
He drank lots of beer, and he talked quite a heap
I just sat and listened. confused and spellbound
He wrote me some poems, only later I found
They were not his own, yet their words were not cheap.
  
They spoke of nostalgia, heaven and hell
Why he wrote them for me is not easy to tell.
Well, somehow, I think we were partners in crime,
He at the end of his journey, I at the start of mine
He gave of his love of both rhythm and rhyme
I gave him my ears and a part of my time.
He did not live long, and I cried when he died.
Now I'm older by some than he was when we met.
I try to repay him, I'm still in his debt.
I'll never write poems as good ... but I tried! 


Next Mondays topic: Diet Craze.