Special Edition: Anthony Wade

Anthony Wade

A Fateful Farewell

Admonitions about calm minds,

informed decisions, wisest courses,

fell soundlessly upon my unhearing,

voiceless noises off against a heart 

birthing tumultuous swellings of passion

setting urgent steps of desire,

reckless of risk,

contemptuous of cost,

scornful of the cautions of the wary,

dismissive of the disillusioned,

exultant in my yet sorrowful farewell,

unknowing then

that the timber of a life,

once crookéd,

can never be straightened,

nor the unforgiving clock

ever unwound.

***

Forsaken

I buried her in March,

not that cold a day

yet can feel still the ancient chill

of the church seeping into my bones,

a cold to match the anger building

with every hollow word the priest spoke

over my Mother's coffin, a stranger

with no more knowledge of her

then I had of him.

We stood grievingly about the grave

so sharply, darkly cut in the resisting soil,

moving away when his silent lips stopped,

and it was only then as I turned my back

that the dammed tears spilled fiercely,

the anaesthesia enfolding me

since the moment the nurse had said,

”She’s dead”, releasing me, flooding

my brain with the total pain

of aloneness.

***

 

Mother’s Farewell

Looking up,

my eyes as limpid as leaf-trembling raindrops

luminous with the liquid light of a waking sun,

absorbing, already wondering,

laughing with an unknown joy,

bathed by my Mother’s smiling face above.

Looking down

at that face now pallid on the death-bed pillow,

its old eyes versed in life’s truths, in its tragedies,

which have brimmed with joy and embraced love,

glowed with dreams, and felt foundering failure

when ambition scrabbled away like a rat behind a wall.

Once febrile,

her eyes are now cool, weary, withdrawn,

for no more is to be seen, no more to be learned,

know that sight itself will shortly cease

with the dawning of darkness,

and will close against her fearing child’s face above.

***

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