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Showing posts with label Submitted by: Anita. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Submitted by: Anita. Show all posts

Afternoons -- Philip Larkin

Guest poem submitted by Anita:
(Poem #1558) Afternoons
 Summer is fading:
 The leaves fall in ones and twos
 From trees bordering
 The new recreation ground.
 In the hollows of afternoons
 Young mothers assemble
 At swing and sandpit
 Setting free their children.

 Behind them, at intervals,
 Stand husbands in skilled trades,
 An estateful of washing,
 And the albums, lettered
 Our Wedding, lying
 Near the television:
 Before them, the wind
 Is ruining their courting-places

 That are still courting-places
 (But the lovers are all in school),
 And their children, so intent on
 Finding more unripe acorns,
 Expect to be taken home.
 Their beauty has thickened.
 Something is pushing them
 To the side of their own lives.
-- Philip Larkin
I came across this poem in the Philip Larkin site [1] and really liked the
images captured so neatly in this poem, especially the last stanza. It is
one of those 'snapshots in time' where the passage of time has been brought
out very vividly. This poem was a part of his widely acclaimed 'The Whitsun
Weddings' collection.

Larkin is a heavily represented poet on Minstrels, so I have nothing further
to add by way of biography.

Anita.

[1] http://www.philiplarkin.com