Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit, Whatever they are, As bribes to teach them how to execute Sixteen sexual positions on the sand; This makes them join (the boys) the tennis club, Jive at the Mecca, use deodorants, and On Saturdays squire ex-schoolgirls to the pub By private car.

Such uncorrected visions end in church Or registrar:

A mortgaged semi- with a silver birch; Nippers; the widowed mum; having to scheme With money; illness; age. So absolute Maturity falls, when old men sit and dream Of naked native girls who bring breadfruit Whatever they are.

How distant, the departure of young men Down valleys, or watching The green shore past the salt-white cordage Rising and falling.

Cattlemen, or carpenters, or keen Simply to get away From married villages before morning, Melodeons play

On tiny decks past fraying cliffs of water Or late at night Sweet under the differently-swung stars, When the chance sight

Of a girl doing her laundry in the steerage Ramifies endlessly. This is being young, Assumption of the startled century

Like new store clothes, The huge decisions printed out by feet Inventing where they tread, The random windows conjuring a street.

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home For lack of money, and it is all right. Places they guarded, or kept orderly, We want the money for ourselves at home Instead of working. And this is all right.

It’s hard to say who wanted it to happen, But now it’s been decided nobody minds. The places are a long way off, not here, Which is all right, and from what we hear The soldiers there only made trouble happen. Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country That brought its soldiers home for lack of money. The statues will be standing in the same Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same. Our children will not know it’s a different country. All we can hope to leave them now is money.

Marrying left your maiden name disused. Its five light sounds no longer mean your face, Your voice, and all your variants of grace; For since you were so thankfully confused By law with someone else, you cannot be Semantically the same as that young beauty: It was of her that these two words were used.

Now it’s a phrase applicable to no one, Lying just where you left it,scattered through Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon - Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless, wholly Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly. No, it means you. Or, since you’re past and gone,

It means what we feel now about you then: How beautiful you were, and near, and young, So vivid, you might still be there among Those first few days, unfingermarked again. So your old name shelters our faithfulness, Instead of losing shape and meaning less With your depreciating luggage laden.

Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) - Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP.

Up to then there’d only been A sort of bargaining, A wrangle for the ring, A shame that started at sixteen And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank: Everyone felt the same, And every life became A brilliant breaking of the bank, A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than In nineteen sixty-three (Though just too late for me) - Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP.