WordsOut poems by Godfrey Rust  | sequence The sailing of the ark ← 3 of 45 → | home        

3

Balding, overweight, at night I plod
the roads of W5 and W13, 

a three-mile token gesture of a run,
dreaming of perfect mortal fitness, 

dreaming that round the edge of Walpole Park
I shall one day run and not grow weary. 

Jesus kept fit by walking, I suppose—
he never had a desk job, or grew old. I can recall 

the day you left All Souls I met your father,
slow and wrinkled, as became his age— 

yet once I heard the wireless commentary
on the 1936 Olympic Final 

with your dad leading for six hundred metres
then fading, Lovelock coming through to win.

run and not grow weary  cf Isaiah 40:31.