Buzzer’s Call
Mum died. I stay busy, yes-yes I’m OK, OK, I’m fine. But Hamlet broods. Grief grows like ivy – delicate, lingering, and rooted in these three poems. On decline. On Decay. On the end of things.
Failing
Shall I lay
when all is said
on laundered pillow,
a hospital bed?
Bone-springs creak.
Magnolia walls.
The nurses’ station buzzer calls.
Fading
A bold and folded rolling wave
will overcome the fooled, the brave,
the wilful, sin-soaked, brash, unkind,
the gentle, worn, the densely-lined
lick back the salted drops with tongues
that brine their emphysemic lungs,
it soaks away a lifetime’s worth
of in-and-out,
of spluttered mirth,
of lover’s sighs,
slapped breath of birth –
pushed under, down, a lifeless flop,
the final sound: the knocking drop,
a spade of English earth.
Flown
Body, boxed. I am not here.
There’s nothing left of what’s held dear
by all whose memory-echoed gaze
cuts through the unshared air, a haze
that floats above my graspless hands,
my dry-flowed vessels, loam and sand.
I’m gone.
I have no hour-ago.
So do not seek the afterglow.
THESE THREE SHORT poems have been floating in my drafts for a couple of years. Extremely inward-looking, and with a voice so mournful it makes Morrissey sound like Ken Dodd, they were initially independent pieces. The dovetailing now seems so obvious.
As I publish them here, I’m in the middle of planning my mother’s funeral. My outlook on the end of things – never religious, always empty of mysticism – is especially bleak. I’ve never been able to find a cosy philosophy to cushion the dreadful sink into nothingness.
When I briefly (tepidly) studied Descartes at university, his arguments that a soul survives felt like wishful thinking. Ever the stoic, I was attracted to Epicurus’s view that death is simply a non-existence. Reading Sartre didn’t help much, with his distinctly French shrug of meaninglessness. But then along comes Heidegger in my little book of philosophers and a small spotlight is shining: it is not death itself that we should focus on, nor the balm of an imagined afterlife, but the awareness of death as the key to authentic living. Death illuminates what counts in life. It completes life’s arc. The memory of the deceased, held collectively, is a version of their soul, present entirely in the living, in those left standing on the platform.
This adds no cheeriness at all to these three poems. It doesn’t suddenly grant me a soul, nor relieve the hardship of my mother’s dementia and dwindling presence. But it lightens the depression that is staining these few weeks, as shared memorialisation does its work.
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Illustration: “The Death of Socrates”, Jacques-Philip-Joseph de Saint-Quentin, 1762
love these dad. I’m not religious, but think (possibly?) the energy goes out of us and becomes something else. I find the idea of life as a cyclical process slightly comforting, though I don’t think we hang about in ghost form. It is hard and I think a lot about her illness and endurance. She is part of us and you. I’ll miss her ❤️
My sincere condolences Ian at this bewildering and sad time. There is a part of us that is never ready for our mothers to die, although we know they must, it shocks and changes so much. Your post and poems are touching and more beautifully crafted than the poem I wrote spontaneously when I sat in the same place you presently sit. I included it on the thankyou card I made to thank people for their support. I haven't thought of it for years, but thought I might share it now with a real poet.
Sleeping on my mother’s pillow
I lay my head down
Inhaling the essence of my mum.
Remembering the feeling of holding her hand,
I feel her hand still.
Clutching the down close to my heart,
I recall the bliss of my mother’s embrace,
I feel the warmth still.
Surrendering to rest at the end of day,
I speak to my mum,
And still she answers.
I wake with the night birds song,
And realise she is gone from this world,
With the light of her shrine still burning;
And for a moment my heart breaks,
As my tears leak silently onto her pillow.
I do not wash it
for it is my place to live with her,
to feel her around me,
her eternal love and the peace it brings.
Ashanti thinks she will come back for Christmas,
Shiran wonders when she will come back as a baby,
Krishan wants Nana to wait in heaven until we are all dead.
Dad says these things happen, and sighs.
I just want to lay my head on my mother’s pillow
And live with her still.