It’s an early, cold Easter and on Good Friday
Jean Munro and I go to a small Greek restaurant on
Charlotte Street for our very first ever lunch together.
She eats with messy, dripping gusto,
Ably assisted by two 75 ml carafes of Retsina.
Over Turkish coffee and Turkish Delight
I explain that my ambition is to be a poet,
While she wants to be more useful to society.
She wants the state to provide a generous but
Temporary safety net for Social Security claimants without
Undermining their fundamental sense of personal responsibility.
Hesitantly, I try to indicate a discreet scepticism about Social Security claimants
Having anything approaching a ‘fundamental sense of personal responsibility’.
The thing is, you see, when you haven’t any money, you can’t always afford
to indulge in the most inspiring moral ideals, I venture to suggest.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, the Son of God is being publicly executed.
We sit down together about twelve, and by three we’re finished
And left gazing, slightly tipsy, at the barren wilderness of an abandoned
White linen tablecloth, liberally scattered with wine stains and breadcrumbs.
And going home on the No. 25 bus in the late afternoon,
I begin to feel I should have been somewhere else all the time,
With everywhere as cold as hell, and all the western skies aflame.
