Thoughts On A Medicine Walk Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Midges, like a scatter of pepper pain
Darken the windowsill with their unmourned deaths

Every leaf, every flower, every cloud will go that way
I too, as my days shorten
Grow more and more like the thin flanked temple cat
Who walks on stiffening paws

The owl that hoots by night outside my room
Her sound will cease to echo round the wood
Like a mellow flute, stoppered, rendered dumb

Forget-me-not is the last plea of the fading petal
And indeed what is death but a widening ripple
In the pool of the minds of friends, till other ripples arise?

I found a litter of corpses once on a Highland road
Dead hawk, dead hare, dead flies
Like drops of ink writing their own obituaries
Poison had entered the food chain, laid by a cunning man

For we are skilled in the arts of death
Who kill by war and murder
Our kind and other creatures

I do not fear to step out of my footsteps
I only fear the means of that last departure
Would float like Shallot's cold lady
Off on a river of flowers if Fate allowed