Three kinds of light
A walking stick, a deadly arc Your face unstitched and come apart. The dying light’s the deepest dark It casts a shadow, leaves a mark. A finger painting just in red A rainbow arched beside your bed. No treasured end,…
![[richard uridge]](https://i0.wp.com/richarduridge.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Untitled-design-1.png?fit=1000%2C1000&ssl=1)
[richard uridge]
Poetry, bikes, dementia...
[richard uridge]
Poetry, bikes, dementia...
Category Dementia
Thoughts on a terrible disease
The last bedroom on the right
There is no pastRememberedOr futureImagined.Just the present.Tense.A singularity.You live in the moment. Very on point as they say.Content (or so I hope) sucking tea from a sippy cupOr shredding tissues in your lapWhile I am walking an imaginary dog (the…
Where non-believers pray
Scene one: a cubicle in A & E For what is deathIf not escapeFrom pain in this worldAnd promise in the next? The words sermon-like. Disembodied. A narrator.A bed of music. Pings and beeps. The baseline drone of a ventilator.…
Inquest jury highlights dementia care home failings in death of elderly woman attacked by another resident as she slept
It’s more than two years since my mother, Sheila Hartman, was attacked by another resident as she lay in bed at her care home, Ridgeway Lodge in Dunstable, Bedfordshire. Sheila – mum – was beaten around her head and body…
Death is only the beginning
I’m not a big fan of anniversaries. The ones you want to forget, you remember. The ones you want to remember, you forget. And so it was I found myself wide awake early this morning exactly a year to the…
Black Hole
Bloodless skin too tightly drawn for lips. White. Like supermarket chicken. A row of teeth along the bottom curve. None along the top. (You lost those long ago.) And that moustache that grandmas get And tickle when you kiss. It’s…
Sheila Hartman death news coverage
Foz
Foz is from Somalia. She steers my mother slowly across the care home lawn. A ship of state adrift on a sea of green. “Here are my two favourite girls,” I call from the shade of the arbour. Because if…
Still Life
Shackled by time slippers shuffledStooped to the high-backed seatQueen throned, grey crown ruffledPrince and Princess at her feet The Prince takes a marbled handBut a child’s touch cannot reach beyondTheir birth to a foreign land To retrieve lost memories fond In…
Mother’s Day
Dear Mum You didn’t like people making a fuss of you. So you weren’t a big fan of Mother’s Day. Before it all became what you disdainfully called Americanised, I do remember me and my sister bringing you breakfast in bed.…