The elderflowers are turning into fruit

12 months must pass before trees flower again

I wish I  had spent more time in that deep scent

Time goes fast, to know that gives me pain

The days of childhood seemed so long and full

We knew the road the pavement and the park

In the houses women worked all day

The love of mothers could light up the dark.

The shape of elderblossom is the same

Yet little berries do not look like flowers

Soon the berries swell and fall to earth.

The changes in the child take more than hours

Live while you’re alive, enrich your time

Don’t die before you’re dead, I end my rhyme

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/9654fee1-d2ad-4da4-ad2f-e32082086f5f?shareToken=7fb47abf7b2786e25aabdb1d704b

Th is my goodbye and thank you after almost two years of writing my Times poetry column. I have loved reading the piles of poetry books – thank you to all the publishers who sent them; I have also loved reading your e-mails and letters. You demonstrated how a poem in the column could go off and have another life; comments, discussions and readers’ poems abounded. And I have loved writing about the poems, trying to relate them to our hopes and anxieties as human beings in my belief that there is a poem for everyone – even a trucker on the M1 who reads nothing more challenging than his sat-nav. Because to say “I don’t like poetry” is like saying “I don’t like music”. It’s a case