Three Poems on Loss and Grief


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






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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




 

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