Dickon Bevington: a poem

A Different Stroke

Riding directly into October's morning sun,

all the white reflecting, light rivering into us

off the long rain-skinned asphalt,

you're holding tight behind me, Dad,

laughing over the throatsong of this big bike's

boxer-twin and all the wind's fierce roar.

We never got to do this, but here, heading toward

the hospital, we're doing it anyway. Can you feel

how the hard air makes tears, and all this noise

pares out a filtered shell of voice, inaudible,

so that the beat of consonants, the colour

of its vowels, holds all there is to say?

Nothing's left unspoken, Dad. Hold me, let go,

look, no hands, only light. It's all light ahead.

Dickon Bevington has previously had work published in The Alchemy Spoon. He has worked as a psychiatrist in children's mental health in the NHS for the last thirty years, as well as a London-based charity. For the last three years he's lived on the River Great Ouse in East Anglia, in the old narrowboat he's restored, and some of his poems address this fragile mudscape, alongside themes of finding love in later life, aging parents, and social injustice.