January 23 2005 Poem by Brian Taylor

“King’s House. Tuesday.3.45.”

An appointment she will never keep
with doctor, therapist, social worker
and next of kin
who try to keep her spirit in,
who are trying to keep her alive.

Saturday night from a subsiding peace,
too shallow to bring heart’s release,
uncoils harshness and anger:
at senses that will not cease
and will not obey her:
at a mind that will always and ever betray her.

Nurses
in her private room
who care for her
are now a source of despair for her;
gaolers
to her living tomb.

“Take me home!
Can you HEAR me! ”
(can you hear me?)
“Take me home!
Now! ”

“She wanted us
to put her outside in her nightdress.
At three in the morning!
Said she would get a taxi home! ”

Home?
“For man goeth to his long home
and the mourners go about the streets”?

No.
Home to Laurel Court Housing Association.
A flat
with a front door
to keep locked;
a familiar bed
to rest the ancient of days
in her head.
“Don’t let the bedclothes
touch that wall!
A spider sometimes climbs that wall.”

No.
Instead she lay
in a Nursing Home bed
while passions pounded
and drifted away;
by her last possessions
so inwardly surrounded;
her thoughts, her images, her obsessions;
ripening of deeds that will not spare her,
for which her preparations
did not prepare her.

Anger flared her
among cooling ashes,
flickered along tired nerves
its spasms.

Quite suddenly,
after ninety-one years
of holding on
to each and everything every day,
her grasp let go,
breathed out
and slipped away.

Ten to six. Sunday morning.
As the country digested
a severe weather warning
of black ice and blizzards
and widespread snow,
she in her last sleep rested
and her last journey let her go.

Aniccā vata sangkharā .
Aniccā vata sangkharā .
Aniccā vata sangkharā .

Eleven o’clock.
One hundred yards from that bed,
where a church has stood
for seven hundred years,
surrounded by the grey stones
of its dead,
a bell tolls.

For whom?
The living.