shot glass
title
"... brevity is the soul of wit ..."
- William Shakespeare

Bio


Colin Bancroft works as an English Lecturer at a College in the North-East. Originally from Manchester, he completed an MA in English at MMU, under the tutelage of Jean Sprackland. He has previously had poems published in Acumen, Agenda, Allegro, Ariadne's Thread, Black Light Engine Room, Broken Wine, Cannon's Mouth, The Copperfield Review, Elbow Room, Lake, LondonGrip, Message in a Bottle, Neon, ScreechOwl and Tellus. He has also been shortlisted for both the Manchester Bridgewater Prize and the New Holland Press competition.


Colin Bancroft


 

Epitaph

Remembrance still hallows the dust of the dead - Byron

She gave me Byron's collected works the day
I left, as we sat around saying goodbye
Outside the classrooms and I put it away
On the shelf when I got home that night,
Where it stayed, until I learned that she had gone.
Anorexia - twenty four. No age that.
I thumbed through the poems, reading each one.
Trying to find some worthy epitaph
That I could copy onto the Facebook wall
Where everyone was talking about their shock
And sadness at her passing and I joined them all
In their grief, in the end using some stock
Phrase, some generic clichéd repose,
That failed, as words do, in times like those.