For Gwen Harwood

1

Your son’s third marriage looming up,
Your mother dead these two months past,
We talked all day of grief and loss,

Good humour gilding all you said,
Turning only once to watch
A dark tormented sea run on.

2

We stood upon a bridge and shared
The river rushing to the sea,
Unhappy till you turned and threw
Two feathers borne by wind upstream,

Then with a third you stroked my hand,
Reversed the flow of time and gave
As lightly as a cirrus cloud
A poem from your childhood world.

3

Your breast is overripe and falls
Beneath the surgeon’s red-hot blade
While distant sunlight like a scythe
Among the black-branched apple trees

Both coldly kills and warmly mends
With pert green buds and milk-white flowers,
Fills up the window of your room
As urgently a new poem grows.

4

Now cancer’s more than just a word
And I’ve thrown off my island-chains
To go forever and a day,
It’s difficult to say goodbye,
But something more than au revoir,

A hug from your protective wings
Is needed when it’s not farewell
To poetry and love’s concerns:
Your finger moves along the page,
The thigh I rest my book upon.

5 (A reply to a letter)

You dream you are trying the door
To “Herongate” lost in the fire,
Your muse-haunted house in the dunes
That sang you the song of the bone.
Your skeletal hand turns the key

Before you wake sad but alive,
"My home irretrievably gone”,
Your letter unhappily ends,
Though there for a change you are wrong:
In death you will go to your dreams.

6 (a reply to a poem)

A skeleton white from the heat,
Again you have dreamt of the fire,
Of opening doors, waking up,

One foot on the threshold, unlike
Enkidu who crossed it and saw
Irkalla’s flame-smothering wings

And literally died the next day,
As you at an unknown time
Will actually enter and lose

Your bones in the blaze of pure light
You stared at on walks through the dunes,
Practising for when you’d see God.

© Copyright: Graeme Hetherington