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Laura Payne Poem
You lay in the wooden cot,
a broken sparrow,
Crushed. Bony. Frail.
Hair once plumed gold,
greyed to clumped feathers
like ragged trampled wings,
strawed out on the dank pillow.
Face once blushed pink plump,
Jolly kind of soft with life,
Sucked to bone. Nose to Beak.
Echoes of the mask it will soon become.
I stroked this woman
now bent back to foetus pose.
Once sworled to shell,
wrapped inside myself,
Safe.
Now boned to carcass stick.
I wanted to hold one more time,
my child,
frightened the last air would puff to nought from its hollowed breast.
But my sparrow turned and smiled,
a grimace to crack open any gates of envisaged hell.
Macabre teeth, once glowing love and laughter to the skies,
Now pecked to ochre stalks.
The pitiful bird pained to move.
Mucous mouth clacked open wide
To receive some lasting morsel of life.
Only its beady blue gaze
flashed a soul of its former self,
eyes to haunt the sea.
I swallowed back my tide of tears,
waves of memory flooding sands of life we’d shared,
from fledgling dawn cry to this,
the final nesting box.
I wanted to stuff this cot with down
of a million eider.
To cosset and hold soft this scrawn, gnawed through.
Pluck teal, goose, swan.
‘Who would have thought it would come to this?’ it croaked a laugh.
I matched smile with smile.
I held the tiny claw.
Desperate not to cling too much to pain,
too much to past.
I wanted to wrap up this dying bird
Limp, in my hanky.
White folded white, fold on fold.
Run through the streets
shouting at the world, at some unseen power.
NO.
She’s mine. She’s safe. Take me.
What cruelty did I do?
What evil must be stuffed in this maternal breast
To hold this daughter dust in my arms?
Copyright © Laura Payne | Year Posted 2012
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Details |
Laura Payne Poem
Today I lived my life with ghosts
Both living and dead
Your face, their face
Slipped through my fingers and fell to the floor
Hundreds of pictures of you and them
Hundreds of moments and moments and moments
Too numerous and caught in that web of time
Dangled on a cobweb so thin, so fine
It could break but does not snap
And lasts and lasts
And holds and holds
All there, suspended in that instant
Before falling to the floor,
Or in the box of memories. To be kept.
So where do you reside, in the bin or the box?
Where do you live for future’s worth?
Will you be cut adrift or salvaged in those stepping stones to the past.
And yet, she still picked up those photos of you
Pained and dulled
Still confused and stabbed by what has happened over time.
She saw your face and paused. Reflected.
She then gently collected up those images of you and me
And saved them in the box
One day for all to see in times to come.
She decided not to put you in the bin.
Unlike me.
She rescued her childhood.
Put down a marker in the sand
And said stop to the sea
To the waves and waves
That break over time and pain
Saved you from the blankless pile of Venice and Florence
And Christmas and beaches and Barbies and laughter
And with a simple dignity
She gave you back some worth.
Copyright © Laura Payne | Year Posted 2012
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