Cancer
The life lived in the body
Was the blood, warm in the veins.
White halos of icy breath,
Frost caught in the sportsground lights.
How you ran and played hard for the team.
It was monsters under the bed,
Shadows on the night windows.
White cold stars in a night sky, shining for us
As we crossed the oval on the way home.
Where we swore our promises of surrender.
It was a growing murmur, the story of
Vows forgotten and loves ending.
White knuckled fear and shotgun heart,
Sitting in the driveway, clutching the phone.
Hearing the word uttered, then uttered again.
Where it starts
The New Holland honeyeaters build a nest
In a fir tree, under the eye of
The calico cat. Sleek and replete,
She curls into sleep.
The sun spears the distant edges,
Smokey haze, and the birds sing.
It’s a nest building song,
And the cat’s tail twitches in time.
The phone rings.
Words crackling with a wilding wind.
He’s ringing from the beach,
He’s seen the doc; the results are in.
I’m afraid it’s not looking good.
There is a shadow in the lung.
A shadow in the lung.
A shadow. In the lung.
Sun dips below the ridge,
Birds fall silent among the
Silent, unmoving fir trees.
Evening cold moves swiftly.
There is the crunching sound of
Scree, where I walk. The cat
Retires inside, curls up,
Dreams of hunting.
The world recedes into shadow.
Shadows commandeer the path.
Lace the trees into forest,
Losing each other to the dark.
Anatomy of disaster
After her son’s death, she turned to Moore’s advice;
(Tend body, tend home, tend mind, tend connections, tend spirit).
And now she has learnt to not drop at the sight of visitors on the path,
When those who care for her, come to offer comfort and cheer.
She has found the peace the moon lays as a trail on the black sea,
And the sand shifting with the tidal flooding at the river mouth.
The rain drenching the ground turns the garden wild, the bush
Sends down mists filled with scents that pinch at her nostrils.
And in the evening light, just as the sunset throws pink across the sky,
She coughs the blood into her handkerchief, feels the pain in her chest;
Familiar yet alien. Like the sea continuing the same old story,
But each day bringing news of the uncontrollable world.