Three Poems on Loss and Grief


Very pleased for my Three Poems on Loss and Grief accepted as part of this amazing exhibition. 






.............................
Three Poems on Loss and Grief: 
A Sounding Voice, Coming and Going & Pleated Heart.

A Sounding Voice

 

The feet of my child, the mind of my child, the voice of my child.

Yet I am on my own in a room.

The feet of my child, the mind of my child… upstairs all the beds are made.

The voice of my child… the whole building is quiet.

Tear a piece of me away, that is what it is to lose that life, which was inside me.

The bedspreads are flat and neat… the ache in my soul of the disappeared baby.

The concrete grey, mint green and raspberry room, that now stands empty,

Is ringing with singing, resonating with the voice of a woman who might have been.

The colours in the room melt in a haze of cloudy diffusion, watercolour pathos.

………………………………….


Coming and Going

 

Every breath is different and every breath hits differently

The process of arriving or departing is a fact and the fact that we are here alive

Is proof of the fact that we arrived.

 

The departing is different.

A life well lived and long.

Or a life never lived beyond the womb.

Ended by sleep.

Ended in an accident.

Ended by another.

Ended by their own hand.

Ended by illness, virus, disease.

 

And after, those of us who have arrived and not yet departed,

watch as people leave.

We see the ways of their going,

and I think of my own going,

and of the departure of the ones I hold dear.

And I wonder how I will survive

and if these losses will mark the beginning of my own departure.

…………………….


Pleated Heart

 

Do not talk to me about February.

The canal takes me to that place in myself,

To my multiple-personality-selves down in the water.

Numbness no words, no …

A void cloudbank has enveloped me.

Temporality shifted, to reveal eternity.

Somehow so strong the belief that I do not belong here in this reality.

This is only a temporary shelter.

Grinding.

The day is not lubricated with happiness

but sounds with the din of metal on metal scraping and dragging.

My heart is pleated.

Concertinaed up in my chest and it is painful to breathe.

Today is like the longest mountain tunnel

with no end in sight,

no glimpse of light,

I just keep walking.

I miss her.

Just a sudden feeling that she is no longer in here.

And I feel the loss.

From this day on, my days will have a new, dented shape.

 

By Frances-Ann Norton




 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Collect Art Publication July 2023

Image
 First published in Collect Arts Summer 2023 edition Stone all the flowers   The year of the art school tutorials. The difficult woman you are to me, and the difficulty I present to you. The year of my recovery and your husband’s death.   Your husband fails and worsens through the days of our trimesters together. As he weakens and declines, I grow incrementally stronger. As if terrible fatalistic scales of balance, set and reset.   Do not cheat her. Give her a full measure of time and experiences with him. Pressed down, shaken together and overflowing. She, in the face of all this decay   Chooses to destroy flowers with stones. Until their purple hearts stained the cartridge with their elemental pigments.   She cuts the flowers only to waste them in the parching sun. It is the cycle of being and unbeing, the grass withers and the flower fades (Isiah 40:8). She decides to press her flowers till their lungs burst on fine cotton Lawn.   Flower tortu
Read more

Five Pandemic Poems

Image
 Five Pandemic Poems 1. Solitary 2. At the bird sanctuary 3. Writing practice 4. Closing the chapter 5. Icon eyes                                              Image from Unsplash Open Source. 1.  Solitary  I could be a fifty-three-year-old woman. Living post-cancer. In a world where cancer is suddenly not the biggest, baddest virus on the Block. All the emotions I dealt with about a growing death within me. Harbouring an enemy in my breast. My habits during illness of self-imposed quiet, solitary days. The lore of stay home, stay safe. Now everyone experiences this in the time of lockdown, in a pandemic.                                              Blackbird Rainbow, by Frances Ann Norton 2.  At the bird sanctuary Its so hard growing up, my beautiful brave girl. The moment you were put into my arms after a long labour I knew you were a fighter, an old soul, determined and singular. You withstand your greatest health burden with magnanimity, dignity and stoic
Read more
Image
  https://www.haus-a-rest.com/new-page-72 Fantastic to have two poem selected for the Haus-A-Rest zine issue 39. Artschool and what it did or did not tell you.  The Ontological Art School and What I Learned There In a game of solitaire, I am dealt a number of random cards – these are my social locators. Where and when I was born and my parents, these things are out of my control. Just like the cards I have been dealt. Knowing and understanding my locators is like playing a game strategy. Making the best use of the cards I have. This is my ontology of the art school. My parents met at post-war art school in the 1940s. Their evenings were filled with philosophical and art theory discussions at the jazz clubs. The ontological context of the art school for me was in the wider community too. My sister and I grew in a network of artists, musicians, poets and designers. I thought everyone lived like this. We I spent our chodhood in the corridors and classrooms of the loc
Read more