Kept Simple Poem by Brian Wake

Eighty seven or eight years old,
she was, quite deaf and yet
we'd bawl our names as though
to rouse her from the slow
decline and stir her almost sleeping
heart, identify our kids and muddle
all her sense of time.

Like curling snapshots kept
to weave the thread of generations,
we kept her. We, my family,
she, a simple woman - mind-jammed
in between the turn of centuries.

As kids ourselves, we'd heard
how she was pulled alive
from bomb-swept streets, in nineteen
forty two, and through the heart-storm
of her mother's sudden death.

At forty five, an orphan taken in
and kept until today when, cutting
threads at eighty odd, she died
and prised two centuries apart.