Silt
POETRY: Shadows lengthen. Presence and absence. Nature knows.
Backs to the house, both fading from view,
the boy and the man pepper shoe-toes with dew
as they walk
past the lawn,
into woods, and on through
to a field
where the undergrowth’s long overdue for a reaping.
The weeds are stick-thick here, imposingly tall –
each thistle-head round as a ping-pong ball,
the grass stalks are flexing their backs in the breeze,
the nettles spring-loaded to pin-prick the knees,
and blackberries starting their late summer swell…
but this is no halcyon, poetic dell.
For there in the ground
can be found, lying wild,
the cremated remains of a stillborn child.
There’s nothing the man can say to the boy,
who stick-swishes dock leaves with explorer’s joy.
No way to explain the loss and the gain
with one child out here, day and night, sun and rain
while the second, the younger is
happily
wonderfully
climbing a tree.
“Hey Dad! Can you see how far I can see?”
What can be said, when a hug for the dead
is like silt, kicked up from a still river bed?
Pointless, so pointless,
to picture the scene, where the first-born survived
– that would mean without doubt
that his brother would never have been.
These futile thoughts:
infinity, in a cardboard box;
a watery cliff on a sea of rocks;
a deep breath, lost, on its way to the lungs;
a secret that’s whispered by bellowing tongues.
Indefinable loss of the young.
So.
The two walk away from this scattered soul,
taking care that their ankles do not pay the toll
of a sickening twist in a fresh rabbit hole.
The boy skips a little, he runs to the ridge
leaps over the ditch with no need for a bridge,
as they leave him behind with the thistles and weeds –
they leave him adrift, underground with the seeds.
Leave him at peace, while one boy and one man
will slip away, running as fast as they can.
THIS IS FOR OTTO, who was still-born to us years ago, and also to Milo, who was born a couple of years later and is flourishing. It’s also for Wendy, the warm and wondrous heart of our family. We have lived in the same house for so long that parts of the building and garden are touched by very specific memories, and each one nudges me to write a few lines from time to time, and to re-write the old ones in a new light. But this particular poem rarely changes; it’s such a fixed memory, prompted by tragedy but relieved by hope and growth. To me, some of the lines feel clunky, their rhythm unfocused, as they try to convey emotion alongside the narrative. It is what it is, and those times are fixed in what they are, baked into the people and the land.
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Photograph by me.
I’ve shed an unreasonable amount of tears for your beautiful family and the stories both you and Wendy weave and share. There you go again, wet pillow, touched heart, stirred soul.
"Pointless, so pointless,
to picture the scene, where the first-born survived
– that would mean without doubt
that his brother would never have been."
Ian, very heavy poem but beautiful. I appreciate the way you call out the futility of selectively editing the past in impossible ways.
We end up recognizing that we are living in the only possible future... The one that actually happened. And our only option is to fully live there. Beautiful work.