Wednesday 9 December 2015

LOVE


So, I'm reaching the end of 2015 with clenched teeth in a permanent smile and a chest full of deliciousness. It sometimes feels that love such as is flowing through me these days is too good for me. Even though I know secretly that I'll embrace it because when I feel it I can let if flow out of me and touch everyone I connect with. If that feeling is even a tiny bit contagious then let it come...

It also means that I'm feeling everything to the max at the moment. Which is no bad thing for a poet and writer, but does mean that everyday living can be game of emotion tennis... volleying each ball as it enters my side of the court. 

Yesterday I visited my mother's house for the last time. She died 19 years ago and since then my sister and I have been kind of stuck in limbo. My mother's new husband (only a year into marriage) was allowed to live in our family home until he saw fit to leave. This year he died and the home where we grew up, became ours again. Back in June when I first entered it again, it felt like all trace of her (and my dad) who died 7 years before her, was gone. Her husband had chucked away all that was hers and had left the house an empty shell. I felt nothing but sadness that he'd treated her, in the end, with so little respect. So, fast forward six months to now, and the house sale finally going through. I stepped back in again and while standing in the kitchen I was bombarded by memories. Mostly of our family christmases when my dad was alive, that year after year we celebrated in the tiny kitchen. 

It felt good to have some glimpses again of a past which did have some happiness infused within them. It gave me, this empath, a pathway to start a different type of grieving process... Here's a poem that is the  beginning, I think, of something bigger.


DEAD
They say the dead
leave fragments
but they’re wrong.
What’s left is visuals
sunk in shadows. 
Spits of sound appear and
with each slight turn of head,
glimpses of light
and the smell of bleach.
They say they leave
pain and agony
but they’re wrong.
What’s left is a room
stuffed to the rafters
with laughter infused
with the cheapest sherry,
newly papered walls
fresh and ready for Christmas.
Each year, a dusty tree
extracted from the downstairs cupboard,
silverfish shaken
from its wire branches. 
And she, bending each arm
to make a tree-like shaped thing,
covered in no time
with bits and bobs pulled out of school bags
year after year with a flourish.
They say the dead
leave fragments,
and if they mean love
that inflates like a balloon
expanding your heart
until it bursts out of your eyes,
they are half right.

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