The Last Swim
September, October … one thing
you don’t know at the time is when
you’ve had your last swim: the weather
may hold, may keep nudging you in.
Only afterwards, sometimes days on,
it dawns on you that you’ve done:
just the thought of undressing outdoors,
exposing bare skin, makes you wince.
And that’s best, to have gone on swimming
easily to the end: your crawl
full of itself, and the future
no further than your folded towel.
A selection of Michael Laskey’s best work from his three full-length collections, plus a generous number of new poems. His earlier collection Tightrope Wedding was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize.
Also available as an eBook from Amazon.