Gathering

I gather trinkets now. Indulgences. Now, at last, when my life grows late. 

A silver ring like a fox; earrings like silver roses – though why I need them I don’t know, knowing we can take nothing with us. Nothing, perhaps, except our memories. 

Will you remember me? Now, I know you do; but always?

‘Shall we meet again?’ I asked the seer, soon after you died. He looked, it seemed, into some kind of space, at once inner and cosmic. After a few minutes, said, ‘Nothing surer.’ Then, after another pause, ‘But not in this time.’ 

Well, duh, I didn’t want to encounter you next as a new infant and I an old lady!

Then again, I want always to encounter you. Whichever way you come, whatever body you’re dressed in. 

There is no body you inhabit now. (Well, not as far as I know.) There is the one I remember … in which to dress your soul … your soul which I also remember.

The trinkets are simply symbols. I wish they might also be signals. Do you receive them, in the ether somewhere?

Symbols.     Signals.     Sigils?

I fill them full of intent.

Exploring the zuihitsu form: 'following the brush' – or the movement of the imagined brush.

Sharing with Poets and Storytellers United, for Friday Writings #237: Favourites Revisited in which I invite participants to identify a favourite prompt and write a new piece inspired by it. When I came to do that for myself, I discovered that there is no particular subject I prefer, but that I most like prompts to which I am inclined to respond using form, particularly some form I feel I'm not adept with and need to explore. One of my current favourite forms to fit that bill is a style of prose poetry called the zuihitsu. I'm not sure I'm even getting it right – but making the attempt is one of my poetic pleasures.

In Remembrance of You

 

I bought myself a ring:

silvery, shaped like a fox.

I slip it on my right hand,

on the third finger. On my left

I still wear my wedding ring

from Andrew, although I am 

long widowed. You too are dead.

I’m fourteen years a widow now.

It feels long. You, I have mourned

54 years already. It seems like 

yesterday. I don’t need a ring

to remember you, or him. 

But I like the thought of at last 

bringing you, too, physically present.

Everything / Nothing

‘Write your happiest moment,’ 

the teacher instructs. I fly – 

not to the birth of either child, nor

wedding their father, not graduation,

not even breathing freedom 

after two huge years 

of Wicked Stepmother – 

but standing in your arms

briefly … everything 

winding down to zero.

Written in response to Quadrille  #237: Zero at dVerse.

(A poem of exactly 44 words, including the word zero.)

And also in response to an exercise in writing teacher Natalie Goldberg's book for memoir writers: Old Friend from Far Away.

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Stopping Time

 Prison Suicide 1982

You had to go. I know you had to go. 

How could you have stayed, to moulder? 

(Would you have mouldered? I don’t know.

I know nothing. I know I know nothing.)

What good would it have done you to stay, 

seeing, only from Inside, the way the world 

would move, open out, the whole vast realm

of the Internet happening so soon – ten years

or thereabouts, in Australia. We might have sent 

emails! Would that have been allowed? What

do prisoners do now? How do the screws

keep track of words going in and out?

I don’t, I discover, see you ever getting 

away. Well, maybe when you were very old.

I’m old now. You’d always have been

younger. As it is, you are forever young –

you who grew old as time, in the time you 

served. At last you made time serve you,

cutting it off suddenly, interrupting 

no, not time so much as that place

where They wanted you to stay. Where,

having freed yourself, strangely you do stay.

Find the back story in my memoir, Breaking Into Pentridge Prison: Memories of darkness and light. Available as paperback from Pentridge Prison Inside Out. Soon to be available as an ebook on Amazon.

Anniversary Reaction

 

At first I don’t quite notice. Then

I start to feel the shift

begin,

a difference in attention:

a subtle, quiet rift

within.

Something is coming closer. My bones,

my blood become aware …

my breath …

Ah! The slow realisations

coalesce, fill the air:

that death.

Written for dVerse Meeting the Bar: RememberThis! 

Form: Memento, created by Emily Romano

Write Me a Letter …

Piercing unaccompanied voice.

A sad-faced man in close-up

in a movie seen on TV, some years 

after it was made. And after I'd learned, 

close up, what ‘Stir Crazy’ could mean.

Send it by mail … And we did.

All the letters eventually burned, 

but I can still quote them … still 

hear your voice in my head. Speaking, 

not singing. Lifting off the page.

Put your arms ’round me,

give my heart ease. Something 

to dream of, if you’d been free.

Roses love sunshine. You wrote me 

poems full of roses: and in one letter

a small pressed flower, called

hearts-ease. A half-joking scrawl

in the margin, ‘Well, I din’t ’ave

no roses.’ Angels in heaven

know I love you.  All my life long,

any time, without warning,

a sweet-sounding folksong – 

plaintive, haunting – in that movie clip, 

or in the voice of Burl Ives, or 

Glenn Campbell, or Johnny Cash … 

or your voice, or mine. Plunging me 

instantly, again, down in the valley,

the valley so low. Where a dead man 

waits in remembrance. (Send it 

in care of the Birmingham Jail.)

NaPoWriMo 2025, Day Thirty

It surprised me that my final poem this April would turn out to be this. I guess something still needed expression. The back story is in my memoir Breaking Into Pentridge Prison: Memories of Darkness and Light, published in paperback 2023 and available from Pentridge Prison Inside Out. To be made available on Amazon as an ebook in 2025.

(This video from the movie begins with the end of another song before going into 'Down in the Valley'):

Always

 

They think it’s long ago and far away,

those who read what I wrote of you

forty years ago and more. It’s an old story

yes, but nothing of it has faded. 

‘Love,’ you wrote, ‘as long as you’re still 

the person you are today.’  I’m not, of course,

but dying fixed you in time. You are always, 

now, the person you were then. So it’s true

what I had written (first) to you: ‘Love always.’

That’s OK. I’m glad to hold you in my heart 

for eternity — or as long as I shall live …

The night around me grows very still.

It is past the midnight hour. 

How many dear ghosts walk?

Wandering Through the Prison

I am there in the walls of Pentridge

among the other ghosts. 

The face of my younger self

floats in and out of the stones.

I walk down the old paths

between the flower beds 

and in through the door

of the small prefab classroom.

But the paths and the classroom

are long gone, ghosts now as well.

Tourists who come are unaware

of that old reality’s exact details.

Ghosts of my friends linger too, 

brothers of my heart, my students

who taught me more than I taught them:

their younger selves, surviving.

I’m glad the place was closed. 

It carried much evil and only

a little good. Was evil in the men I met?

Perhaps. More in how they were treated.

We are all gone from there now,

out into other lives — except the one

still imprisoned. Except that other one

who died. Do we still meet in those corridors?

I like to think that even after I’m gone

to wherever we go when we leave,

some fragments of the selves we were

linger, weaving love through those old stones.