[This was written as my farewell to Hansard, on my retirement in March 2025]
I've worked in many organizations over the years - big and small, private and public - and run my own business; but my time at Hansard stands out, and I'm very grateful to have had the opportunity to finish my working life here.
The Hansard mission statement sits on our front counter, a disarmingly simple collection of words that belies the ethos that underpins it; and you who fulfill it and its ideals fill me with admiration.
I'm a relative new (and late-) comer to Hansard, but from very early on I felt a deep and rewarding sense of mission and belonging. A quiet, flawed perfectionist, I felt enabled to make a difference while I'm here; but in the end I hope to have trodden lightly on the sandy beach - to have left a trace for others to follow should they choose, but to not have rutted my way as they make their own path.
I once said to Prudy that there are no good poems. The greater their merit, the deeper the scars they leave on the strange, obscure place whence they are hewn, the mullock heap of abandoned ideas, fragments both glittering and malformed which will not find a place in the frame. But even bad poetry rises into the light; and so, now, some occasional verse.
Enter occidental adit, finding parking where we may
navigate portunal arch, so authorized we make our way.
Sacred halls of red and green lead us to that private close:
cells and carells seat the scribes, transposing spoken word to prose.
So verbing tangled heap of phrases, tense and aspect reconcile
Improved on perfect imperfections, they punctuate and set in style.
Two thousand days in cloistered service, facilitating as required
smoothed their pathways technologic, produced account of what transpired.
But my love loves the saltwater tang of the sea.
Our southern coast homeland is calling to me;
the tug of the tide turns our heads towards home—
our time here is over, and we must move on.
So I'll go no more to that house on the hill
arriving at daybreak when morning is still
in a half-secret landscape, as light paints the dawn
crepusculence colouring lagomorph lawn
where flutterfly flag blazons blue summer sky;
our adventure concluded—we say our goodbye.