‘104 this May’ sounds like a fever,
So it’s fine he died not quite ninety-one,
Having written his books, seen off his friends,
Outlived his century, but not his sons.
Eight, in nineteen hundred and seventeen,
He was thirty-eight in ’forty-seven
And eighty when the Wall came tumbling down.
He couldn’t weep (he didn’t have the glands)
But he could laugh; he had this wandless knack
for filling up a room with happiness.
He did twenty miles per hour, swore at
passing cars, spoke English in five Indian
languages, and died in Tamil. He stood
children on his feet to bounce them, chucked them
up (and caught them), but on that day, after
Y2K, weeks short of May, he set us down.
