The Tiger
Do you ever get that feeling that
You’re flying, or you’re dying, and
You’re watching, like it happened once before?
When your mind is rather hazy, or disturbed
And much too lazy to remember where
You saw that scene you saw?
I just get this one returning, like
A ghost that's finished haunting
Other folk, but who has settled now on me.
But I know that I remember that this
Ghost of mid-December was a Terry James
I knew when I was three.
He would start his Triumph Tiger while
Enraptured by the window I
Would watch him in his leathers and his jeans,
Then he’d stroke his tank and wave me, for he
Always called me Davey; 'little Davey'
He would say, for I was three.
And the smell of oily jerkins
Leather jackets, dirty denims would
Pervade him ‘til he smelt just like his bike,
Though that throaty Triumph Tiger was much
More than just a bike, it used to roar
When stroked by anyone it liked.
I can see the chrome and trimming, and
The flash of all the women who
Would cling with streaming hair behind my friend,
‘Til the day my mother mentioned to my
Father, (who was pensioned) , that she
Always knew he’d meet a wicked end.
Then at dusk they brought the Tiger, smashed
And torn, without its rider
To the house that Terry James would see no more,
And the years that followed laid it, let it rust
And quite dismayed it, though I’d jump the fence
To ask it what it saw.
But it answered in its silence that
The end had been so violent in
The sudden shock that tore its metal heart,
That its roar was gone forever, and the
End of a believer made it feel like a
Deceiver from the start.
Now these visions fairly haunt me of
[...] Read more
poem by David Lewis Paget
Added by Poetry Lover
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