a face like the worn map of tragedy
lined with a life of service
that should have ended in an honoured peace
among those you bore and love
your hands reaching out
to the TV camera
begging for water, food
or beseeching
in some unrecognisable, ineffective
local language, or
cursing an enemy not visible
who made a ruin of your home
or being carried unceremoniously
between urgent hands in some material
from a bed that is no longer there
or sitting bemused by life
awaiting some unnamed help beyond request
though never accompanied by your son
who has found a greater cause
than home, or age, and somewhere else…
or, in the occasional poem –
tended, your paper skin and jutting hipbones
not unlike some starved chicken’s carcase
described with painful love
as if you only lived a living life
in the past tense,
beyond the verses, between the metaphors
and yet, if we could only find words
to describe what’s still living,
where pride hides, a pride
too precious now in grief to speak,
how you love those who are not here..
and yet, you’re there, alive or dead
patient, proud, silent, and unnamed,
in every poem
that has ever been written
and I salute you