The Ring-Pull Chain Poem by David Lewis Paget

‘It’s all I can do to remember
Your face, your look or your smile,
You left one day, but you didn’t say
You’d be gone for many a mile;
For many a mile and fortune
That you took in your pocket then,
You left me chained to the window-pane
To welcome you back again.’

‘I stared for many a morning,
I cried for many a night,
But kept my pain on a ring-pull chain
I counted by candle-light.
A link for each day you wandered,
A yard for each month you strayed,
Three hundred feet back in Stanley Street
Is waiting to be unmade.’

‘You took my love at the parting
But me, you left behind,
My love was never returned, so lost
I followed, travelling blind.
My tears I wove in the ring-pull chain
To save for the day we met,
But steel corrodes, and the old crossroads
Have never been rained on yet.’

‘The days of ‘sorry’ are over,
The long regret’s begun,
I came to see if the memory
Would dare to call me ‘son’.
If I ever have a child in trust
While life is lost in pain,
I may well go, but my love will show,
And there’ll be no ring-pull chain.’

25 June 1977