Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?
Rilke for June and Bronwyne, Aged care home-help None. But these come, grounded angels, more useful than the litany of winged messengers each religion offers. Always calm, always…
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They dreamed the dreams of dirt, flailing, being buried alive in trenches bombed to splinters that shredded eye and bone. Silence made them edgy. Bombardment, thunderous and rattling, was the…
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Island Harvest
For Ruairí & Marie-Thérèse de Blacam, Inis Meáin suites and restaurant, Aran islands, Ireland eating periwinkles requires a harvest, back bent under a slate sky, seawater green as jade, wet…
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Someone is tonguing the honeycomb of my spine, while I walk, while I sleep. With no familiar name like Age or Death, unknown, unexpected he has burgled access, and with…
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Just when I have it by heart: that hip-swell of hill curving into Barr na ghaoith, Top off the Wind; each rolled smooth stippled stone of Boatharbour and Drimmeen beach;…
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Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?
Rilke
for June and Bronwyne, Aged care home-help
None. But these come, grounded angels,
more useful than the litany of winged
messengers each religion offers.
Always calm, always giving, they wear violet.
Invisible among us, I didn’t know them
till exhausted, I cried out for help,
buckling under this burden, this loved parent,
a man, one hundred years of age.
Wings of dragonfly gossamer, frets
of hidden steel, engined by light
as angels are, their inner pulse is compassion,
humour the fluid in their veins.
Gifts are lodged in them we cannot see
revealed slowly over time.
When they come, they rewind his memories
with word games, cards, old albums.
Magic conjurors, they help him
shuffle his stories into newness,
those I have heard a thousand times.
They coax him, where I command,
laugh easily while my smile feels set.
Each muscle in me aches, tendons tighten.
Hands over-used, fingers click a painful rebellion.
I am heart-tired, bone-tired, too weary even to weep.
They tell me everything, all this, is normality.
They teach me how to clear away risk,
equip bedroom, bathroom, to watch
his body, to glove myself into forbearance,
needed to clean up mishaps, how to bandage.
They are fearless of his old skin,
‘leaking legs’, limbs so full of fluid his cells
weep, as if those fleshy blocks are melting.
Their glance is gentle on us.
I feed on their kindness, the babe in caring I am.
I want to be the good daughter
they tell me I am. I see him slipping.
Sadness swells in me, a reservoir
dammed below the sills of my eyes.
Sometimes when they come,
they make me go and walk the beach.
I collect the broken bones of shells,
twisted fluted spines, white and lovely
in their fleshlessness, glass fragments rolled
a million times smooth, translucent, pearly, bottle-green.
I place them on my window-ledge with fan-shells
the colour of sunset, an empty shark egg. This attention
to amassing the shattered, the crushed on the sands,
is respite from the loss in my father’s draining life.