Imparted

(CW: Childlessness and mourning.)

There’s a hole in her heart,
or maybe just her torso;
a phantom organ that
squeezes and kicks,
dances in frustration in the
soft places between.
She apologises, sometimes,
knowing it will never see the light.

She hopes it’ll shrink,
as time and hope slope by;
she knows it can’t be filled with
other things, and busy-ness,
but maybe they can
crowd it down,
wear at its hard edges,
muffle it somewhat.

It wriggles, digs in sharp fingertips.
It has a trigger for every season –
presents unbought, traditions unshared,
snowballs unthrown, slopes unsledded.
There is blossom not to fondle, soft and sweet and small,
birdsong unidentified, wingflight not pointed.
There are beaches not to run on,
shells not to clatter in sandy, seaweed pockets.
There are conkers uncollected, fireworks uncooed,
sharp scents of brown leaf missed, and bonfires unlit.

She knows she could only be
even more tired, even more broke.
She knows photos and friends and
values and poems and families-of-choice
can be legacy, can write her love
into eternity.

She also knows that knowing
does not soothe the kick and squirm,
can’t sing it the lullaby she’ll never write,
won’t rock it, rocks herself instead,
bitter and sweet and utterly alone.
Just for a moment. A long, long moment.
While near, small voices pipe and skirl, contented,
through the first warm sunset of the year.

This poem was written in April 2019 for NaPoWriMo and, pronouns aside, is still true for me today. I don’t mind admitting that and, I strongly suspect, I’m not the only person feeling such things right now. Spectral has a fair number of pieces that deal with my… interesting relationship with my body and its vagaries, and with romantic relationships and theirs. Without going into too much detail, this piece is where those things have collided and left me stranded somewhat. High and dry, if you like.

Such a cliché, at times, me…

Anyway, difficult-and-necessary as that turned out to be to write for myself, it earned a place in the collection and inspired an illustration that turned out harder to accomplish than anticipated.

Inspired by “big tree with swing on green field, Chiang Mai, Thailand” by Auttapon Moonsawad, it took on a life of its own which you’ll see in the next post, and left me with a cramped hand and a sense of bemusement, but at least I have not one but two illustrations out of the thought. I had to do a fair amount of adaptation of the original inspiration, which involved such rabbitholes as learning about the entire resort of treehouses in Chiang Mai and the coffee house in the giant tree, none of which showed me what the top of such a tree looked like, so… improvisation…

Which you’ll see on Thursday. I’m getting ahead of myself again. As you can see from the concept scribble, I had a whole notion of having ivy twining around the rope. Ivy was going to feature prominently in a variety of the illustrations (twined around the kingfisher’s branch, draped around the standing stone, etc.), but I abandoned the concept in favour of, you know, actually finishing stuff.

Only a couple more to go, and this book is now feeling terribly real, somehow…