Sunday meditation

Time marches on and I am 58 today, a world away from the callow youth of 18 who left home in the south to go to university in Yorkshire. Since the start of this year I have been reading a poem a day, in an effort to understand and appreciate that most curious of literary forms. It still doesn't come easily or naturally to me, but I was particularly struck by a work called Leisure, written by W H Davies, who lived from 1871 to 1940 and is now best remembered as the author of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. If he is remembered at all, that is.

The opening lines of his poem go:

WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—

Davies's words have a particular resonance for me in my changed circumstances and present frame of mind and I remember them on this special day.