We’re method actors,
playing the parts
of wounded, wounding wrestlers
locked in a hold from which
a silenced voice inside
may once have told us
never to disengage.
Eyes closed, our temples beating,
muscles and tendons tight,
limbs intertwined—
so deeply immersed in our roles
we no longer remember
the playwright’s lines,
nor how to return
to the wings, the Green Room, nor
the dressing room door.
In the corridor
I’ve never felt a greater urge
to hug someone than when,
in response to ‘how is he today?’
she stopped, quite still
under fluorescent light:
‘Our Mum’s been told
we need to say goodbye.’
She stood, uncertain,
held in place by the air
that flowed around her, eyes
as deep and dark and wide
as eyes have been, above
the stitches picked out, perfect white,
on the mask she had to wear.
But I couldn’t respond. She
breathed again, and carried
the weight of her losing away.
And I returned to sit and relate
the news of the world outside—
football, family, politics—
to your unopened, unstill eyes.
April 4th
It’s blood and love and institutions make society,
you’d said; society that makes the State.
How fitting, then, that love and blood and institutions
shared your cloudless April day.
A cavalcade of institutions called—successive roles
revealed by how each carried what they wore,
by what they carried in (and carried out)—and chronicled
your vanishing, foreseen but unforetold.
Your blood and love were sure and hesitant, as you had been:
we lifted, touched, sent messages, made soup and tea,
and talked with you of pain and comfort, Spain and poetry;
more silently of how a poem ends.
Flights, Issue Thirteen, August 2024
Flight of the dragonfly 