"Halley's Comet", by Norman Nicholson

My father saw it back in 1910,

The year King Edward died.

Above dark telegraph poles, above the high

Spiked Steepled of the Liberal Club, the white

Gas-lit dials of the Market Clock,

Beyond the wide

Sunset-glow cirrus of black-furnace smoke,

My father saw it fly

Its thirty-seven-million-mile-long kite

Across Black Combe's black sky.

And what of me,

Born four years too late?

Will I have the breath to wait

Till the long circuiting commercial traveller

Turns up at his due?

In 1986, aged seventy two,

Watery in the eyes and phlegmy in the flue,

And a bit bad tempered at so delayed a date,

Will I look out above whatever is left of the town--

The Liberal Club long closed  and the clock stopped,

And the chimneys smokeless above damped-down

Furnace fires? And then will I

At last have the chance to see it

With my own as well as my father's eyes,

And share his long-ago Edwardian surprise

At that high, silent jet, laying its bright trail

Across Black Combe's black sky?

(From the Norton Anthology of Poetry, Fourth Edition)

-- posted by Sophie Quinton