ᛗᛖᚦ:ᚠᛟᚦᚨ:ᚻᛖᛁᛗᛋ:ᛋᛈᛖᚲᛁ:ᛟᚲ:ᛟᚱᛚᛟᚷ:
Með fǿða heims speki ok ørlǫg
(Regarding Creativity and Nourishment, Worldly Wisdom and Destiny)
In the last days,
my son spoke candidly
about how he was dazed
by the news
the Queen had died …
and I responded.
Those moments
became times for reflection –
and learning and teaching …
about his own thoughts,
weird connections with the Queen
and life and death in general.
He was amazed she had even died –
he had an unreal sense
she would live forever …
after all,
she had been a symbolic fixture
throughout his whole life.
Of course,
he expressed many ideas
and we unpacked them
in our own way –
I even mentioned
her passing meant nearly nothing to me.
It did not though,
because we then filled the drive
(on the way to his Friday night basketball match)
with conversation about her –
including her curious place in history
and her humanity.
What started with a passing comment
about having been within two feet of her
on peculiar occasions during my life,
led to talk of her caring for her grandsons
after learning of their own mother’s death
and the value of ‘playing the ball and not the man’.
The length of her reign,
her disinterest in explaining her actions to others,
the value of avoiding solipsistic jingoism,
how the miraculous might appear mundane
and rapid functional decline prior to some natural deaths
were also discussed.
That and more came from the death of ‘a little old lady’
who happened to be born into a role
she filled with relative aplomb
and whom the Fates allowed me to spot
(at one time or another)
wearing the Prince Albert Sapphire Broach.
Douglas Colston has played in Ska bands, picked up university degrees, supported his parents during terminal illnesses, married his love, fathered two great children, had his inheritance embezzled, transitioned into Counselling as a vocation and experienced debilitating mental and physical illnesses. Now, among other things, he is pursuing a PhD. Some current and pending publication credits include works in Revue {R}évolution (Spring [2023]), Impspired (Issues 19, 18 and 16 [2022]), Ygdrasil, A Journal of the Poetic Arts (Vol. XXX, Issue 11, No. 355 [2022]), POETiCA REViEW (Autumn and Summer [2022]), New Note Poetry (Spring [2022]) and Red Door Magazine (Issue 30 [2022]).