Poems for the dead - my best friend, my cousin, my mother
by Heleanor Feltham, Australia
Museum professional, Aged 60
Poem for Jane
Jane, you deserve a better poem than this
I've tried it off and on for years now,
Watching your cat grow old, knowing you never will -
(and that's probably just as well; though I could see you
Fascinating lovers at eighty, still smoking pot and staying up all night)
I miss your open generosity,
Your spangled mind, full of lights and rifts -
Holes you could drive a truck through;
Talent to burn.
The endless searching for the one true love
Pursued across the world - Canada, Vietnam,
The South Pacific Islands, Rome, Milan -
And on board Sydney's yachts.
Was it the water, the ever-dappled, iridescent harbour,
Fickle and lovely as the guys who sail it?
I see you still
In that mermaid top of iridescent scales
Sequinned like summer water.
A lethal night of love and alcohol;
A doctor who had killed before, and whose
Unforgivable, un-acted-on, untenable stupidity
Prescribed your death.
You were an alcoholic, Jane, why did you love
A drunken artist half your age?
I can't think what that poor guy underwent
To wake and find your body lying there
Dishevelled in the bed, the cat howling,
And only empty bottles for company.
('Take one too many pills', he may have said,
'And no amount of love can keep your heart
Still beating').
And all the congregation of your friends met for your funeral
The chapel sodden with grief
Our faces crumpled up like wet tissue
And your poor mum, trying to reconcile
Her fundamental God with your bright life
And sudden, pointless death
No one seemed to know
If it was accident or suicide
Least of all the officiating pastor.
But you would never kill yourself
Not even in an excess of doubt
Or sudden fear of age.
You are slid back
Under the waters, and we left standing here
On the dry shore.
Funeral for my cousin Bernard
The Priory church was filled to the least pew.
Faces unknown, faces official,
Faces of friends and colleagues, relatives,
A sea in the dim, incensed light of the golden church.
The family knelt in the front pew,
The priests intoned,
And no-one heard a word
Of the eternal, structured Catholic service
That should have comforted with its verities.
More Anglo than Celtic,
Culturally constrained to decorous sniffing,
Our sodden handkerchiefs, wads of wet tissue,
Were evidence of a loss far greater than
Conventions could contain.
In a ravishing ugliness of unconquered grief
We wept in red-eyed, unforgiving gulps
Red-faced and dripping-nosed.
There must have been a grave-side.
Nothing remains
Of that part of the usual ritual
Except the endless lines of slow-paced cars
From church to graveyard plot.
I don't believe it rained; I thought it should.
And after, at the wake,
Drinking his spirit home,
We all told stories of a tall, young man
Who loved his job, his friends, laughed, rode a bike,
Drove his Dad's Merc to Melbourne much too fast
Played jazz, was generous to a fault &
We all told stories,
Filling out a life
Cut off too soon.
Deaths Head Moths
Death is a cloud of moths,
Heavy-bodied, silent-winged,
Bearing the image of their own mortality.
Drawn soundlessly to the fraying, tattered self
That leaks the light of an ascending spirit,
The death's head moths shiver into a cloud
Circling my mother's bright, electric soul
With singed, dark wings.
And through the windows opening into age
They flow on evening's winds,
Their scaled and shabby velvet
Spiralling in a dim epithalamium,
A wedding-dance of soft-furred circlings.
Death's eggs hatch in her lungs, constrict her throat
Death's caterpillars feast on the bones of her spine
And gnaw at her heart like a leaf.
They make their way
Through the arched catacombs of arteries
Clogging the blood;
And moth wings brush the sweet lucidity of her mind
Blurring the light with dim, umbraceous bodies.
This is no swift release, as the light fades
Slowly they circle through the browning air
Dust drifts from their spread wings
And with exquisite patience
They yield to darkness.
For the dead
When I was young, age was a sometime thing.
Solid as monuments in their adult pride
Friends, parents, mentors were my buttressing
All temporal bounds and edges set aside
(For the certain young know nothing of all this)
But that generation gap, that seemed so slight
Is now a vast, unbridgeable divide;
A terminator line of day and night.
And parents, lovers, friends and mentors slide
Out of recall, and into the abyss.
Catharsis of our tears brings no relief.
The terrible emptynesses of the dead
Challenge the formulas of our easy grief
There is nothing to say, nothing that can be said.
Copyright © Australian Museum, 2009