A year or so ago one of the residents at my mother’s nursing home, Pirton Hall, died. Not an uncommon event in an environment within which the average age is 85. But Elsie was unusual in being relatively mobile, compos mentis & possessed of a lively sense of humour.
I was visiting Mum on the morning of Elsie’s funeral. Through the library doorway I watched the coffin being carried down the hall & out to the hearse. Mum was asleep in her wheelchair, her breathing so shallow that it barely lifted the shawl across her chest. As the hearse moved slowly down the drive, followed by two cars bearing the few friends & relatives, I recalled Siegfried Sassoon’s lines: ‘And when you sleep you remind me of the dead’.
Maybe ghoulishly, but I believe more as a means by which to contemplate my mother’s fragile mortality, I wrote the poem below. I’m posting it a second time now because since February I’ve been working on a more difficult poem. It tries to go beyond a simple contemplation of death & loss, confronting instead the retreat & ultimate disappearance of a vital individual once so comprehensively known into the fog that, for so many, cloaks the very end of life. Metaphysics apart, how can one not question the point & purpose of the tenacious heartbeat when so little remains of what once flourished?
When I eventually complete a first draft (& it’s close now) I’ll post it. Finisterre offers a kinder perspective from the other side of closure.
FINISTERRE
The ‘phone rang early on this morning
much as any other. One of the nurses
at the home. You recognise her voice,
the tall one. Clears her throat: “I’m sorry,
very sorry. Your mother passed away
last night. Died in her sleep. She looked
so peaceful…” Silence, just the view
through the bedroom window.
Autumn’s edge. You clear your throat.
Platitudes, you notice, edges buffed
by years of distant comfort, administered
over the winding of so many sheets.
Strange employment, you reflect, working
at the edge of finisterre, both gardener
and ferryman. And then you drive there,
numb, between the unharvested fields.
The day before, you wheeled her
down the drive, the beeches crowding,
still in leaf, a draft of crows above each one.
And from behind the Hall, like vapour rising,
Shillington bells afloat, now clear, now cloudy,
ringing away the years for both of you.
For her, a wedding just before the war,
or maybe bells occluded in a winter mist
on Erith Marshes, standing at the garden gate,
bonneted for church. For you, the ring of six
cascaded like a silver chain, unlinking
as it fell. You turned. Along the fenceline,
through the trees and into the fields beyond,
a child is running hard towards the world’s edge.
9:51:24 PM 
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