Normally I would not put up another post so close on the heels of the first, but a comment from my real and blogger friend Gretta has inspired me to put up two of Gretta’s poems from an anthology that Helen Annand published in 1998. The anthology is called
The second Worst Thing: Poems on Surviving the Death of a Child.
Gretta describes the poem she has already posted on Dustchange as her one poem on grieving. Perhaps she has forgotten these. I have not and never will.
I’m afraid I cannot format the text as it is laid out on the page in the original, but the words are as intended.
Birthday Song
Bobbing, bobbing
in my bed of tears.
I saw how they would be.
Smooth skin, knobbly wrists
jutting from cuffs
on long skinny arms.
He’s dead.
Dead?
He’s grey ash in the garden.
No knobbly wrists?
No teenage wrists.
Skinny arms?
Never were…
Never will.
Lament
smother me in white clay
the cracked mud of mourning
stop up my ears
no clamouring silence
cover my eyes
no grey bundle of flesh
plug my nose
no sour yellow seepings
plaster my lips
no kisses lost on vacant skin
For Christopher who died at 8 months and Joel, at 4 months.