I remember

I remember covering each other’s absence

from laboratory practicals;

myself away at union meetings,

while you’d gone to the movies.

A perfect working relationship –

when we were young together.

I remember your disbelief

when told I couldn’t ride a bike;

the insistence that I learn

on your boneshaker with its dubious brakes –

when we were young together.

I remember shopping trolleys:

how we moved house with belongings piled

high in a caravan of them;

and how you used to ride one around the supermarket,

in among the tinned tomatoes

and widest affordable selection of breakfast cereals

when we were young together.

I remember being out in the snow at night;

hurling snowballs, making angels, and tobogganing

on borrowed lab trays and a plastic toilet lid;

crashing into drifts and each other,

and staggering, sodden, home –

when we were young together.

I remember, I remember

when we were young together.

Seeing half a dozen films in a day –

everything from the sublime to the ridiculous –

then discussing our own scenarios into the early hours.

Taking the late night bus into town

in our anti-fashion threads, and dancing

to an exhausted immobility afterwards.

Plucking up the stomach to follow you

onto the fastest, scariest whirligig.

And though you’ve gone ahead

to where I cannot follow now,

you’re here still in my memories of

us always young together.

in memory of Phil Godfrey, 1957 - 1991