Loving Don Quixote
Even now I love you, gentle Knight
of the Rueful Countenance,
because I have always fallen most deeply
in love with vulnerable men ---
---not losers exactly, but dream-led searchers,
driven by a mad need to excel---
boldly pursuing glory in second hand clothes
or--- like my father, who left school at twelve---
wearing his top hat in the President’s box.
Yet they were nobler than the world they entered,
their poor decisions readily forgiven
as we forgive children who contrive
to play for honour without calculation
simply to make sense of being alive.