Al McClimens

Go West
 
He offered me the job right then and there.
Five years, minimum. You’ll come back rich
and famous. If we make it back, that is.
We leave at dawn. It’s always dawn, notice?
I said I’d sleep on it. And to be fair
I’d never been to India. By which
I mean, none of us had. My courage failed.
When I got there next morning, they had sailed.

I’ve thought about it since. What if I’d gone?
I should have, shouldn’t I?  Well, wouldn’t you
wonder what if? What if I’d been the one
who spotted land? They built a huge statue
to him beside the dock in Barcelona –
Columbus, pointing to America.

Al McClimens is an unemployed waster, fond of a claret and hopelessly devoted to reading novels. After a long and undistinguished career in the NHS and later in H.E. he took early retirement to polish his sonnets. Don Paterson has never heard of him.  He lives in Sheffield, the capital of the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire, where he plans to grow older disgracefully. His first full collection, The Other Infidelities, was published in 2021 and is available via Pindrop Press (www.pindroppress.com).  And if that’s not enough he has a more recent (Feb 2024) pamphlet The Placebo Effect, published by Hybriddreich Ltd. (https://hybriddreich.co.uk/)