The Madison Handshake

Thank you to those who put money and messages on Bethan’s Just Giving page for the Cambridge half marathon, which took place last Sunday. The target Cancer Research UK had set me of £300 was dispensed long ago and the total currently stands at nearly £1,500. All of this will go to CRUK’s new Kids and Teens fund.

The messages, though, of course, are more important than the money. I had wanted to create a place where Bethan’s friends and family could come together for her 21^st birthday and to a certain extent this has provided that opportunity.

I am logging a report on the event in the form of poetry. I am not sure if this is what usually happens on Blogspot, but as it’s my blog, I suppose I can do what I like. 

A technical note: the Madison handshake or hand-sling is a cycling term for a relay rider handing over to the next team member by swinging them forward. 

Rites of Passage

At gun time, the column moves off,  

the filter of the canopy on Midsummer Green

shattering the sun into a cascade of snapshots,

rendering our progress in stop-motion capture,

holding this birthday in memory’s aperture.

Panning out of the trees and onto the streets,

I jog in rhythm to the isotonic slosh

of my day-glo flask,

to the drumsticks making the bash barrier crash,

to the vuvuzelas,

to the slap of soles,

to the metres and the feet,

to the rasp and wheeze,

to the sweat and the tears,

to the twenty one years.

A river of lycra

snakes along the high street

between Superdry and Sports Direct.

Heads bob like waves,

their crops lit with haloes of the first sun of Spring,

as though a heavenly host

were entering this celestial city.

College porters,

like dark angels in black bowler hats,

eye me with suspicion

and prepare to eject 
such a sorry wretch
from this procession of the righteous.

A hairpin bend on Silver Street

defies the laws of Physics

as the runners of the future

pass the joggers of the past

both moving in opposite directions.

And in that intersection of time and space

I sense what it is I have come here to find.

Not what I wanted - for that is dead and buried

but what is left.

And though he is not even here,

not even in the county,

I reach across the hairpin

over the miles and the years

and send the Madison hand-sling

to my stripling son,

pass the momentum

from the old to the young

and watch him fly

over the tarmac and onto the home strait,

now beyond the reach of that racing demon
that would have run us down.

Slowing now to a pilgrim’s pace,

I am drawn to the finish in the mighty wake 
of  this Spring tide surge

as it laps over Midsummer Common

and douses Jesus Green in a sea of shining crowns.