Bar Mirror

He had not recognised me or I him.
The place was crammed and rackety, and our eyes
Took each other in, and we didn’t realise…
We stared, and we ruled each other out until
After several glassy seconds I found the will
And the nerve to speak. Well — it must be! — He knows my name.

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Tom Bower

The truth about Mohamed Al-Fayed

In the warmth that dropped on me after the ice-cold air,
I’d been looking for someone I knew, to launch a greeting
Eagerly after long decades of never meeting.
In a crowd of loud unknowns I would still have said
I might tell this man from the back of his schoolboy head,
And a sureness that the same face would still be there.

But whereas I’d kept down to a coating of grey
Hairs the strictures of time, he must have chosen
At some one point to cast his looks in this frozen
Fix of resolve: a magnate’s air, or the stance
Of a judge or a general offering little chance
Of mercy or pardon to anyone in his way.