Lines for my Uncle

You are my mother's youngest brother;
I remember in a pale, warm promise spring,
You came to visit with a lightly clothed German girl,
You'd been to India, mending bicycles the story went,
Now lived a communal life somewhere "down South,"
Arriving with dried fruit and eccentric presents,
A bearded teller of exotic tales,
You were the source of racy stories to impress friends,
I never really thanked you for that.

You told me one deeply blue-bottle summer that the freckles,
Which peppered my Celtic complexion,
And which I hated, according to some,
Were remnants of other lives I had lived,
In sweet smelling, higher-skied, distant lands,
Clothed in skin of a different hue,
This revelation, which I recognized to be true,
Took me on long solitary journeys.

When I was older, and living in London,
You invited me out one evening,
Beardless now, tall and gently dressed,
You took me to Pugin's palace to show me democracy,
We sat watching the decision makers fence,
Then, after the disillusion, walked along the Thames;
On a russet-mooned, Autumnal evening,
I saw politics was a game played by mortals.

You are my mother's youngest brother;
Amid winters white drift doctor's give a deadline,
You say that you are calm, putting things in order,
Ready for the next leg of your journey,
You tell me that you are not afraid of dying,
And neither are you afraid of living;
I weigh the words and their strength;
Sometimes you have placed delicate objects within my reach,
These lines are just to thank you for that.