I don’t care too much for money

Must be six weeks since it jangled in my pocket,

since coins were important – or indeed notes.

That community cafe where they didn’t take cards,

I think, when I drove home from the festival of poets.

It can’t buy me breath, nor health, nor touch now.

Not even my supplies from the local Tesco –

a dead commodity nobody wants, if it can’t

pay the cashier for a bottle of Prosecco.

I dandle none, dander to the shore, no where

to go and nothing there to buy when I arrive.

Other matters matter more now – new-born

values that are somehow very old and wise,

precious as those four tiny ducklings that

repay my real expense of energy in walking

by two trembling minutes of splash-play –

instinctive, feathery balls, together frolicking.

Live, little ones. Avoid the crows.

Flourish.

*

‘Testimony of the Untested’, a daily lockdown poetry series by Robert Alan Jamieson, who is in recovery from a corona-like virus. You can read his other works here.