It is true that when they came
they were not so unfamiliar
as I had expected, though I
didn’t guess at first
they’d come for me. They were
as the painters had depicted them,
tawny, lithe, fresh-visaged.
And their song, ah their song,
more of the syrinx than the larynx.
The pain I felt in every wasted
fragment of my body ebbed and
eased away. I was young again.
The branches of the trees parted
and filled with light. There was
a sense of déjà vu but perhaps
that is true of all endings. There was
no resistance on my part; how
could there be? I was entering
the unknown which inhabits all women.
Consider that I who had loved life
conformed to my final transformation.
~Jim Newcombe
Jim Newcombe was born in Derby in 1976 and now lives in Chiswick, West London. He is currently involved in recording a Librivox audio anthology of the work of the English visionary William Blake. The composition of poetry for Newcombe is an act of concordia discors, an attempt to impose order on a shambolic life and a personal consolidation of Socrates’ conviction that the unexamined life is not worth living. He has had work published in Staple, Poetry Nottingham, Tears in the Fence, The Bohemian Aesthetic, Shot Glass Journal, The Poetry Box, Mobius, The Stone & Star and The Recusant.