December 8th 2013: One Year On

Mum and Us

I don’t often post poems here, always mindful of competitions and submissions, but sometimes life’s too short, and this is for my mum…

.

In-between

.

Walking winter fields today,

the world all hushed and still,

I wondered was it down to you,

until a high-pitched waspish

Slingsby Firefly whined

across the limpid blue.

.

I admired its acrobatic moves,

its stalls and dives,

its loop-the-loops,

and then remembered

something you once said:

.

during the blitz

the nightly buzz and hum

of Luftwaffe Messerschmitts

became quite comforting –

it was the hours when skies

were hushed and still,

the in-between,

that everybody feared,

.

and I remembered

how accustomed I became

to drones – the warming fan,

the bleep of monitors,

the arm-band squeeze,

the rhythmic white-noise-blues

beneath the rattle-n-wheeze

of your pneumonic lungs

.

and, as the pause

between your breaths

grew longer and more frequent,

I would hold mine, waiting

for when yours began again.

.

Now, exactly one year on,

I see that’s how it is:

.

It isn’t what we’ve heard

that wakes us in our beds –

the in-between,

the white-noise space,

the what’s no longer there

is what we dread.

.

 

Tagged: a quiet time, anniversary, Creative writing, death, death of parents, messershmitts, Mother, Mum stuff, poem, Poetry, remembrance, the blitz