1. Night Time

Darkness in our sleeping house,

I'm last to bed again and do my rounds,

Of bedrooms, dimly lit, and shadowed beds,

Tiny dreams, soft breaths, and two blonde heads.

There's only two, my sleeping sons, to see,

Seven, two, and one who's gone for good,

A gentle darkening in the softest light,

Comes with me as I turn in for the night.

I don't look back and agonise, what for?

The simplest fact won't change if I still grieve,

We held him for that blissful hour, no more,

Then left him in the room and closed the door.

2. Post Script

As we left hospital, a note was passed,

On blue tinged paper, subtly, to my wife,

It explained the ugly process we'd to use,

To register our dead son's tiny life.

Such common sense is what you need at times,

You'd fall apart if left to work it out.

We put the paper down onto a pile,

Unread and tried to get on with our life.

So ten days later, working way down South,

I got a call from Lesley, breaking-up,

"I've let him down; they've rung me up to say,

He's waiting there, he's not cremated yet.

3. Paper & Ink

Bureaucracy to legalise a life,

Our new born son that didn't make it through.

I registered his birth at five past twelve,

Then his death at twenty five past two.

That's two hours twenty minutes for the forms,

Four times as long as Joseph lived, just waiting,

Then fifteen minutes over to the morgue,

To give the word to start our boy's cremation.

Paper, ink and effort in what cause?

Though now our tiny tragedy is stored,

In a blue-grey filing cabinet of forms,

And the dust that moved like mist inside the hall.