Category Archives: Year

Muffin

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The ghost of a marmalade cat
Crosses my path from time to time,
Materialising from nowhere
And vanishing into nothing,
Gracefully and nonchalantly
Parading each of his nine lives
As yet unlived before the car
Caught him, helpless, in its headlights.

He is but a pale memory
Of a prince of cats, barred with light
And bursting with life beneath a
Calm and gentle disposition.
In living room and children’s beds,
His favourite spots are vacant.
Fastidious still, he now frequents
The fireside corners of my mind.

Muffin was killed on 28th November 1988.
Poem finished on 10.1.89

Oh, where is my Teddy?

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Oh, where is my Teddy?
I can’t go to bed
If I haven’t got Teddy
To place by my head.

I don’t think I left him
Downstairs in the hall,
Or lost in the garden
Where the grass grows so tall.

I had him this morning
With me in the car,
I don’t think he fell out,
He can’t have gone far.

He’s not in the bathroom,
I did have a peep,
If I haven’t got Teddy
I can’t go to sleep.

I’ve searched in the kitchen
Where I know Teddy runs
When he’s looking for honey
Or sugary buns.

Will you please find my Teddy
And bring him to me,
I’m lonely without him
And he misses me.

Will you tell him it’s bedtime,
Mummy’s kissed me goodnight,
We said “God bless Daddy”
And turned out the light.

But I lie awake, waiting
Alone in the dark
And thinking of Teddy
With me in the park.

It’s cosy and warm
And I soon fall asleep,
I dream of green monsters
In blue oceans deep.

When I wake in the morning,
Beside me in bed
I find Teddy sleeping,
Just like Mummy said!

Helier lost his Teddy, and found it! April 1976

The Woodpecker

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Behind the house on a bright spring day
When the sun at last had come to stay,
A woodpecker tapped on a hollow tree
And sent secret messages down to me.

He tapped all the morning and then flew away,
What did he tell me? What did he say?
“The summer is coming, it won’t be too long!”
That was the gist of the woodpecker’s song.

19.2.77