Lip Reading

Browsing comments from the past,
The sort of thing you write
To those who mourn;
‘Always had a joke to tell’,
‘Will miss his happy smile’,
‘Much loved by all he knew’.

We accept these platitudes
With grace, these honest lines
From club and pub
And charitable trust,
The hospital where he passed
Away, the lip-reading class.

This last lament from the hard of hearing
Reads of ‘how he persevered’.
I see him leaning in
Keening for all the many words
That might have been. The unannunciated
Vowels and consonants of misused time
The silent, shaped, – ‘too late, ‘too late’.