Body of Oceans
for my Grandfather
Body of Oceans
for my Grandfather, dying in a hospital ward.
Body immobile
body of oceans
confluence of arms and legs
whose arteries have met all these years
in the city and shorefronts
of muscle and sinew
do not go
where the sun tortures by day
and the night no longer
whispers its eternal things.
Body resisted
body unmoved
by suffering, in the heart
there are the chambers of the heart
and in the chambers there is the gentle
folding of memories
as the pulse falls and life
is packed in the hallways:
at the door
there are the entrails
coiling to the dreams of remembered meals
and the pressures of release
in liquid earth
add urgency to the hands folding memories
as the waters draw near.
Body unfolded
body of flowers
in the seeming cruelty
of the angel of urine and life
there are the tunnels of secretion
and the petals falling
through the hand uplifted in the stomach
and the grief
of the body falling
becomes water as the sky turns dark
lightly now
the rain is falling on the fields
into a welcome
we can only ever understand
to begin with
as silence.
-from Songs for Coming Home
My colleague Angela Cummings, constantly amazes and surprises me by finding poems from my early work that I have almost completely forgotten. I can tell from the language, that, as well as the felt pain and poignancy of losing my grandfather, I was reading a great deal of Pablo Neruda at the time. I have put my hand on the shoulder of my younger self by revising the last lines, in order to go a little deeper than I was able at the time. The original lines were ... 'lightly now/ the rain is falling on the fields/ into silence'. DW
The photograph carries the austerity of the winter landscapes of Yorkshire. The isolated farmhouses, with their few surrounding trees, keeping the moorland at bay, carrying families and their animals through one century to another. The racing skies, and almost as if I can hear them, the mewling of sheep in the fields about the house. DW