There was old man from the Retirement Home who used to come just as far as my window, struggling to walk, with a frame.

Then he used to turn, laboriously, preoccupied by the effort.

I don’t see him any more. I assume he has died.

Then I realised  I had watched such a scene before, looking down from my window in a poor street in Toronto, in Canada, where I lived in 1969.

There was an old immigrant man who used to come by.

I found this in my papers, another of those things I used to write and paste up, using Letraset, when I lived in Toronto. I would have liked to have been able to write songs then, but that was the best I could do.

When I read it back I realised I had placed him in a different winter landscape, more like the one I am in now.

 

As the morning light breaks, the rooks in the nearby tree swirl up together.

Their cries are like the distant breaking of crockery.