Esther Chilton

It’s Friday and so it’s time for my guest writer slot. It gives me great pleasure to welcome Lance Greenfield this week.

If you’d like to be a guest on my blog, please get in touch: estherchilton@gmail.com. Poems can be up to 60 lines and prose 2000 words. If you’d like to add a short bio and photo, then great.

Lance has been a regular on my blog over the years and I’m sure many of you have enjoyed his responses to my limerick and short story challenges. Today, he’s sharing a poem about his dad. Here’s a little background to the poem:

My dad, Tony Greenfield, was one of the world’s top statisticians. He was also, in his earlier years, a journalist and a very good writer. He was born in Chapeltown, near Sheffield, in 1931 and died in Broomcroft House Care Home on Eccleshall Road South in Sheffield in 2019. The geographical distance between the two is about 10 miles. He loved to travel the world and was always curious about everything.

The Decamile of Life
– the life of Tony Greenfield

From Chapeltown to Broomcroft

Is a mere ten miles:

A decamile, mas o menos.

That’s not a long way,

But it took me almost eighty-eight years.

---

I taught you all to estimate,

And to understand the errors.

Fifty-two thousand and eight hundred feet

Sounds like a very long way,

But it took me over thirty-two thousand days.

---

That’s less than twenty inches a day!

But consider this:

I went via Bedford and Brocksford,

Healey and Hillsborough,

Grenoside and Millbush,

Lyme Regis, Lake District, Peak District.

---

I went to Barcelona, Budapest,

Linz, Oslo, Rimini,

Dortmund and Gothenberg,

Copenhagen, Helsinki,

Katmandu, Quito and Marrakesh.

---

Skiiing in the Alps . . . AND on the River Tay.

Around the world, along my way.

Fiji, Bangkok and Chang Mai.

Nelson, New Zealand

To see my brother. I’d have liked to stay.

---

Sydney and San Francisco,

The Amazon rain forest,

Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru,

Rio Napo and the Andes,

Islas Galápagos too.

---

I’ve dined in Turin and Cagliari,

And Venice and in Rome,

In Ljubljana and in London,

Paris, Wroclav and Stockholm,

In Tel Aviv and Vienna.

---

And I’ll tell you this.

Everywhere I dined,

All over the world,

I’d spill gravy down my pink tie,

And I’d ALWAYS check my flies.

. . . THAT’S a lie!

---

So my life was just a decamile,

A very remarkable decamile,

Thirty-two thousand days.

Every inch and every minute,

For all of us, here today,

Has been full of laughs and smiles.

---

Have fun!

***

Tony

Lance is a retired technologist and military mapmaker. He is a full time carer for his wife. He enjoys running, reading and writing. Lance has travelled to about 80 countries in his life and declares that “it is not enough!”

Lance has two published novels in the inspirational fiction genre: Eleven Miles and Knitting Can Walk! He loves to write poems in his head as he walks around with his dog, Sammy, and put them to paper and refine them when he gets home. He says that his best poetry comes rom his heart when he is feeling emotional.

See more on his blog: lancegreenfield.wordpress.com.

Lance