Heavy with the long goodbye,
The hollow smile of a parting guest,
A flare disappears into the empty sky,
And now this fragile paper mountain,
The fruit of our love, our favourite re-creation,
Floats into a hostile and blatant world,
My dream, my baby, my work of art,
I see you plundered under the trampling feet,
Let go like a poem written, lost and never read,
And though the tears tumble across the page,
Though I ache from this endless shedding skin,
I still button my coat,
Still shine my shoes,
In readiness for a bold and future step,
For this is who I am and this is who you wanted me to be,
Heavy with the long goodbye.
(This poem is about letting go and loss. I wrote it when I was grieving for my Mother who died of cancer three years ago. So it is, on the one hand, about losing something in particular ('The hollow smile of a parting guest') and, on the other, about letting go of anything you care about a great deal ('My dream. my baby, my work of art'). Whilst some may find it a depressing poem, I hope others will find the purity of its sadness uplifting. Once let go, the world does what it needs to do and you do what you need to do. Your inner fragility confronts an external world of relentless happenings. But somehow you find strength to face into the future.The poem ends with a resolute steadfastness, a defiant personal declaration. What you let go taught you something very important, like a Mother that long ago taught you how to button your coat, how to shine your shoes. These lessons never leave you. They are eternal in you.)
A comment from my friend, Nick Turnbull:-
ReplyDeleteThe poem takes as its starting point the protracted departure of a loved one. By contrast, the imagery of a flare being extinguished, in line 3, conjures up a sense of brevity, which retrospectively often seems to be the case when we condense something or someone precious, that we have lost, into a compact elusive entity, which at the same time casts a long shadow and engulfs our thoughts. Grief, fear and sometimes guilt threaten to blunt our vision and rob us of a true appreciation of that which we have loved and lost, leaving us with a bitter sensation of emptiness and vulnerability. The poem conveys the feeling of the unnerving apprehension we feel when we expose what we would consider to be “a part of ourselves”, such as our children or a piece of creative work, to the ravages of life beyond the safety and protection of the life-giving and nurturing cacoon.
In line 11, a watershed in the poem, the synthesis of the bitterness of loss with the renewal that follows is suggested. The “shedding of skin” brings to mind a sense of rebirth and the realization that the loss we experience in any paradigm shift is an inevitable consequence of the creative process. As Sogyal Rinpoche stated, “Learning to live is learning to let go”. The poem finally brings to our attention those habits embedded in us, forged by those who have been closest to us, and the realisation that we ourselves act as a permanent reminder of those we have loved and lost.
Hi John,
ReplyDeleteLeigh passed this onto me. It really touched me, made me cry. Very beautiful.
Thank you for sharing it.
Tracie