Poetry Monday

The Garden Party

by Donald Davies

Above a stretch of still unravaged weald

In our Black Country, in a cedar-shade,

I found, shared out in tennis courts, a field

Where children of the local magnates played.

And I grew envious of their moneyed ease

In Scott Fitzgerald’s unembarrassed vein.

Let prigs, I thought, fool others as they please,

I only wish I had my time again.

To crown a situation as contrived

As any in ‘The Beautiful and Damned’,

The phantom of my earliest love arrived;

I shook absurdly as I shook her hand.

As dusk drew in on cultivated cries,

Faces hung pearls upon a cedar-bough;

And gin could blur the glitter of her eyes,

But it’s too late to learn to tango now.

My father, of a more submissive school,

Remarks the rich themselves are always sad.

There is that sort of equalizing rule;

But theirs is all the youth we might have had.