Finding Edna

BRUCE HARRIS

 

A July day in the backyard is melting away,

the velvet evening smothering to darkness.

She felt her head heavying some hours ago,

her eyelids drooping to the dull hum of the world

and now the gaunt, figure invisible by age,

is visiting memory, dreams and images.

 

Through the late teen’s breathless desperation,

a flickering snapshot of the beginning of war;

square hair, September, magisterial radios,

the hush in the garden before the bombs start to fall.

Illicit night swims with mad moons and him

his spare alabaster like a shape for all sin.

 

A raw rage of childbirth, rations and mangles,

An adulthood avalanche descending like vengeance.

Knees, fights and tears, ironing in mountains,

cold weekends groping to beer fumes and Bensons

and suddenly three childhoods completed and gone,

like cries in a station reverberating.

 

To robust grandmotherhood, a role like a fortress,

doggedly held against the long siege of age.

Baby-sitting and treats, unlooked-for advice,

feeding on glimpses and glances of kindness,

anxiety states in spectating enclosures

watching young lives go galloping by.

 

For him, life dried up; the brave, bouncing boy

had all drained away into parched skin and bloodlessness.

And so to the hard club, arrived like a sentence,

the day time clock beat of the lonely old ladies,

tap-tapping away like the tiniest bird noise,

in a vast and echoing chasm of silence.

 

As the cold chill of night descends on her frailty

Old Edna has passed away in her chair.

Nosy but nice, a neighbour will find her,

six days later, lividly statued,

unkindly picked out by a pointless sunshine.

Forgotten Edna, anon for all seasons.

 

Highly Commended Poem, Build Africa Poetry Competition 2012