First place winner in the published poets section of the 2019 Robert Burns Poetry Competition.
The Dead: A Migrant Life in Two Parts
1: There, My Last Memory is Home
Forever, as I leave you,
my last memory of home
remains. Like the revenant,
it’s built of things already lost:
white sheet out in bad weather;
TV keens at audience; blank, cold room
nurses a dead pot of tea. The air stirs
with silence my mother will not break.
Nor I, who walk past her and out …
into lonely world. Without affection,
I know I must never look back
into this memory: mirror; dark place.
To birth something as precious
as a child then bear them to give up
is no grief at all, no way to surrender
goodbye goodbye
is no grief at all, no way to surrender
a child. Give them up, then bear
to birth something as precious,
as dark and mirrored as this memory.
I know you will never look back,
the world lonely without affection
as you walk past me and out …
of a silence you will not break. Daughter
of dead air, stir empty tea-pot, nurse
cold room, keen audience of blank TV.
White sheet out in bad weather,
you are built of things already lost.
The revenant-like remains
of home and memory last
forever as you leave me.
2: Here, I Live in the Haunted House of the Past
The window is an unforgiving friend.
It holds me in. It swallows my sky,
banishes strangers, neighbours
and those who get too close. Gone
elsewhere like migratory birds. Gone
to fearful spaces beyond, like the dead.
Now my days are full of such absence
as settles me. Unquestioning as faith,
I observe the sanctity of ceiling
and wall, the furniture of my life.
When night creeps in to wipe me away
with its insomnia, I become small
screams in a house. In the morning,
I return to the window of my world
as if to a poem I refuse
to complete. Here I think
of newspaper reports about civil war
in Syria and Yemen, migrants displaced
to oceans dark as glass, and drugs
which enshrine dependency. A ghost
of someone I used to know disturbs
the window with its knocking, and I
remain frozen to think this stranger
wants to commune with the glazed-
like thing I’ve become, the swallowed
sky reflecting my lasting need for flight.