The late Brian Patten (1946-2025), Liverpool poet, is the designated Bard of today’s apostrophe poem by our Poetrywivenhoe poet Lynn White – a clever cento composed of lines from eleven separate poems. Lynn’s own interjections appear in italics. To Brian Patten (A Cento and Apostrophe) Yesterday you were my favourite living poet, there, watching and smiling, now yesterday seems so far away. So I wonder - did you build your ship of death, knowing you would need it, or did you rage - rage against the dying of the light and not go gentle into that good night when it was time to go, to bid farewell to one’s own self, and find an exit from the fallen self and falling skies. With one quick call dreams can be aborted and become like a marooned whale. Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul, has her footing washed away, as age dark flood rises, cold dash of waves at the ferry-warf - posh and ice in the river, a gray discouraged ...