I have brought you to the threshold of life

And the fulness of living;

I leave you, now, with a sad unsure reluctance;

My heart torn with happiness at your life’s fulfilling

And a sadness of nostalgic yearning for yesterday.

Life has been a pattern woven

Of flowers & sunshine

With interspersing rain.

Life has been the raw cold of Winter’s weaving

And the bleak pain.

Yet I yearn for the years past.

With only the joy to remember & the hurt forgotten.

My recollections are

Of the gay days, the laughter days

Of the shared sweet innocence of childhood,

My prayer, now,

For the continuity of laughter days

In your life.

The calm & the quiet balm of happiness

You are poised on a pinnacle of love

To plunge to the future

(Found below holograph manuscript of above text next to my father’s bed when he died. He had dashed the words off on a page, torn out of a cheap exercise book, yellowing with age)

Note, at top of sheet, numerical calculation in "old" (pre-decimal) money, £s, shillings & pence. Meaningful & personally important to him at the time, but, devalued after death. You can't take it with you when you go, you know.

"Heart torn" - he died of a heart attack at age of only 53!

Lovely that he wrote that for me shortly before he died.

Other work by my Namur King:

Hiraeth

Aberfan

Parting 1940

Coal Patterns

Brick Horizons

Remembrance Day

To Be As One With God

A Plea For the Old Ones

The Pharos (Dover Castle)

There's a Moral Somewhere

Today has never been before

St. Paul's (London May 11th 1941)

Ode To A Snowdrop During Wartime

Thoughts on the Immutability of Matter

Ode to the Full Moon during an “Alert”, 1942

Ode to Goldie, the Golden Eagle on its 10th Day of Freedom

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