It came winging back to me,
at a sticky teatime on Tuesday
as my daughter whinged
about the early evenings:
a boomerang of a recollection.

Pinched by the wooden seat
in a winter afternoon’s lesson,
Lecher Lloyd in those cuffs
standing by the eternally-rolling,
scruffy-black-scrolling board,
trying to explain those times
when the Sun could never bear to disappear
from the very southernmost of places -
or was it that it would never dare to appear
at the northernmost, where we would be waiting?

And then,
as I finished my daughter’s crescent-bitten muffin
with a mug of tea,
it circled back
in a satisfying arc,
and my mind stretched and caught it.

The fat man clutches the pole,
and when the pole leans towards the Sun,
the Sun can always see his reflection
in the fat man’s bald patch,
but when the pole bends away,
the Sun, try as he might, cannot take his eyes
from the chewing-gum on the fat man’s shoes.