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, a chest of blood
All stuffed with sheets to stem the flood.
While three wards up a different cry
From howls of pain to sobs of joy
A mother chests a swaddled boy
And each lights up the other’s face
Both full of life both full of grace
A summer sun that floods the space.
We are three kinds of spectral light:
The lightning on a summer’s night,
The flash that makes us blinding bright;
The lodestar guiding us from birth
That marks the way and warms the earth
And steers through storms that plash our path;
The dying light’s the deepest dark.
It casts a shadow, leaves a mark.
This is the latest in a series of poems born* from my mother’s violent death at the hands of another resident in what should have been the safety and sanctity of her care home bedroom. Black Hole was the first creative response to the awfulness of it all.
Three kinds of light has been a long time coming. It started as a no more than a few lines and a title three months ago and has gradually taken shape – perhaps even subconsciously – ever since. Until it emerged in roughly the shape it is presented here I might have been inclined to call that period a time of writers’ block. But it strikes me now that struggling with the mechanical part of writing – putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard – is really just a sign that you haven’t yet done enough of the rational and emotional stuff that lies at the very heart of poetry.
*I think that’s the right word. It struck me as she departed this world from her A&E cubicle at Luton Dunstable Hospital how, just a few floors away, other souls were arriving in the maternity unit. Arrivals and departures almost like railway terminus.