Leonard Lambert
Gentle Giant
You never enjoyed your triumphs,
you wanted others to win,
and ached to lose sometimes, I could see it,
by a whisker of course, just a wee bit,
simply to share the credit around,
to not for once stand out…
Captive to a father’s dream,
you had your mother’s nature
and, it seems, her heart, which failed
and felled you at your height:
Champion Axeman, it said, dies at 48.
See? I told you. I was never that great.
Leonard Lambert’s the most recent collections are Skywire: love poems (Steele Roberts 2008) and a chapbook, A Morning Walk in the Later Days (Cold Hub Press 2011). A new collection, Remnants, is with the publisher.