Last Lines Poem by jim hogg

We're hand in hand and silence crowds.
I feel compelled to blurt out loud:
it's deep enough and running free;
that teacher might have stepped in here,

through swirling flakes of falling snow,
when she was eighty four years old.
A favourite spot perhaps, at night,
where bitter-sweetly stride by stride,

she walked away from everything;
the fading past, the coming spring.
Or maybe there was nothing left
to hold her to the life she'd led.

I pictured how she must have looked
in knee length coat and winter boots;
her make-up done and hair brushed back,
abyss of aging in her heart;

her face a mix of grit and fear
lest passing strangers see or hear.
And wondered too just how she felt
when she last bent to wield her pen,

connecting all she was and willed
in all the lives of all those kids,
with only two or three more souls,
or none at all for all she'd know,

in this great teeming web of need
when she decided to cut free.
And did she wonder too, that night
when fighting that last lonely fight,

if Woolf was with her as she strode
into the wintry Kelvin's flow;
into that graceful tying off;
her modest words protected from

the icy waters of the stream
by humble shield of polythene.
I read them through but couldn't say
I knew enough of life to claim

I'd drained them of the dews and deeps
her navy ink would never yield.
We strive for pearls, we wring the stones,
and dream beyond mere flesh and bones.

She must have wanted to be read
was how I read it way back then;
to leave some sense of who she was,
a lasting trace when she was gone;

beyond her name and empty house,
beyond the strength that snuffed her out.
is that the kind of truth that bleeds
her little hopes, their massive dreams?

I doubt there's any way to know.
The Kelvin flows on as before;
her noble cause boiled down to this:
mere moments on the careless wind.

02 07 20