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Wessex Hymn

Alex Saynor

Thursday, October 8th, 2026

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 We used to play football on winter fields
on ice which hardly melted all the day long
by arches strung at a right angle to the Thames.

2 Leave a comment on verse 2 0 We used to play all summer long, or just a day
with tourists in Alexandra Gardens
careful of flower beds to a degree

3 Leave a comment on verse 3 0 as when we played by decades of greetings cards
faded into a single blue in the summerhouse
of our grandparents’ house in Ferndown.

4 Leave a comment on verse 4 0 We used to play under the relief road
‘tunnel amusement’, kicking the ball to the roof
on a road made safe by concrete bollards.

5 Leave a comment on verse 5 0 We used to play as if our lives were somewhere else
waiting for us, and I suppose they were.
We once played in Hamworthy Rec

6 Leave a comment on verse 6 0 pretending our names were ‘Paxo’ and ‘Oxo’
and though you became a professional
that game was lost to laughter unrestrained,

7 Leave a comment on verse 7 0 a total eclipse of cool by Poole Harbour.
Those were the games and ‘those were the days’
is what of the unrecoverable is said

8 Leave a comment on verse 8 0 but with a thought to multitudinous future games
and a son’s requested sea shanty in the lounge
I hear the first Mercian hymn echoing
in Wessex, heed its end and ‘sing it again.’

Notes

Various memories of childhood games, and thoughts of current & future ones.

The end of this is a reference to Geoffrey Hill’s first Mercian Hymn.

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Source: https://footballpoets.org/poems/wessex-hymn/