Mother Who Gave Me Life

Mother who gave me life
I think of women bearing
women. Forgive me the wisdom
I would not learn from you.

It is not for my children I walk
on earth in the light of the living.
It is for you, for the wild
daughters becoming women,

anguish of seasons burning
backward in time to those other
bodies, your mother, and hers
and beyond, speech growing stranger

on thresholds of ice, rock, fire
bones changing, heads inclining
to monkey bosom, lemur breast,
guileless milk of the word.

I prayed you would live to see
Halley’s Comet a second time.
The Sister said, When she died
She was folding a little towel.

You left the world so, having lived
nearly thirty thousand days:
a fabric of marvels folded
down to a little space.

At our last meeting I closed
the ward door of heaving glass
between us, and saw your face
crumple, fine threadbare linen 

The Sharpness of Death

I

Leave me alone. – You will?
That’s your way with us women.
You’ve left my mother so,
desolate in my father’s house.
But that’s not what I mean.
Suppose we come to terms:
you take one day for each
day that I’ve wished to die.
Give me more time for time
that was never long enough.
Look, here’s a list of names.
Take these, the world will bless you.
Death, you’ve become obscene.
Nobody calls you sweet or easeful now.
You’re in the hands of philosophers
who cut themselves, and bleed,
and know that knives are sharp,
but prove with complex logic
there’s no such thing as sharpness. 

II

Hiedegger

Like Wittgenstein, he found much cause to wonder
     ”that there are things in being”.
Searching for roots, he thought all words were names
     Given the German language
and his training as a Jesuit seminarian
     he could talk about God’s Dasein,
and in untranslatable reasonings maintain
     that the human concept Being
and the question “What is Being?” are essential:
     since man’s a language user
he must say things are, or cannot speak at all.
     He called philosophy,
in his late works, “the enemy of thinking”.
     Rilke said song was Dasein.
Heidegger left ontology for Hölderlin
     and his blessed Grecian world,
“the language in which Being speaks to us”.
     Untranslatable as ever!
Was it significant nonsense or deep insight
     flowed from his pen? He thought
much about dying. No one could dying for him.
     Poetry lef him
close to the Logos. Nothing could be proved,
     but much was hinted.
Death, he said, was “the ultimate situation”.
     I hope he found some light
beyond that field of black everlasting flowers.

III

Nasturtiums

Purest of colours, how they shone
while we talked in your studio.
Light like a noble visitor
stayed with us briefly and moved on.
A schoolgirl bringing flowers, an artist
accepting colour and crazy love,
we stand among the plaster mouldings
of figures from an earlier time.
How would you ever know me now
if I came to your grave and called you,
unless I brought those flowers, those colours,
that ray of light descending through
the room’s eccentric fenestration?
Seed of the seed of countless seasons
blossoms to hold the light that’s gone.

IV

Death, I will tell you now:
My love and I stood still
In the roofless chapel. My
body was full of him, my
tongue sang with his juices, I
grew ripe in his blond light.
If I fall from that time,
then set your teeth in me. 

Triste, Triste

In the space between love and sleep
when heart mourns in its prison
eyes against shoulder keep
their blood-black curtains tight.
Body rolls back like a stone, and risen
spirit walks to Easter light;

away from its tomb of bone,
away from the guardian tents
of eyesight, walking alone
to unbearable light with angelic
gestures. The fallen instruments
of its passion lie in the relic

darkness of sleep and love.
And heart from its prison cries
to the spirit walking above:
“I was with you in agony.
Remember your promise of paradise,”
and hammers and hammers, “Remember me.”

So the loved other is held
for mortal comfort, and taken,
and the spirit’s light dispelled
as it falls from its dream to the deep
to harrow the heart’s prison so heart may waken
to peace in the paradise of sleep. 

A Valediction

As always after partings, I
get from its place the Oxford Donne,
inked in with aches from adolescence.

Who needs drugs if she has enough
uppers and downers in her head?
Though names are not engraved herein,

who can be literally dead
if he leaps from an underlining
into my flesh at The Sunne Rising? 

Lou Salomé in her old age: “Whether
I kissed Nietzsche on Monte Sacro
I find I do not now remember.”

Young Saint Therese of Lisieux, writing
“When I love, it is forever.”
One mistress of half Europe, one

enclosed with a transcendent lover.
Dear ladies, shall we meet halfway
between sanctity and liberation?

Today I leave the book unopened.
Strangely, this farewell’s left me joyful.
Can ghosts die? Yes, old ghosts are summoned

back to their shades of ink. My lover
will come again to me, my body
to its true end will give him joy.

Now in his absence let me walk
at peaceful sunset in the pasture
feeding my geese, my latter children,

and when the afterglow is gone
Lou’s ravishing forgetfulness
will rock my soul with saving laughter,

and the singlehearted saint will braid
all loves into one everlasting.
Then, if I need a lullaby,

good Doctor Donne, will you attend?  

Gwen Harwood

At Mornington

The told me that when I was taken
to the sea’s edge, for the first time,
I leapt from my father’s arms
and was caught by a wave and rolled
like a doll among rattling shells;
and I seem to remember my father
fully clothed, still streaming with water,
half comforting, half angry.
And indeed I remember believing
as a child, I could walk on water -
the next wave, the next wave -
it was only a matter of balance.

On what flood are they borne,
these memories of early childhood,
iridescent, fugitive
as light in a sea-wet shell,
while we stand, two friends of middle age,
by your parents’ grave in silence
among avenues of the dead
with their cadences of trees,
marble and granite parting
the quick of autumn grasses.
We have the wholeness of this day
to share as we will between us.

This morning I saw in your garden
fine pumpkins grown on a trellis
so it seemed that the vines were rising
to flourish the fruits of earth
above their humble station
in airy defiance of nature
- a parable of myself,
a skinful of elements climbing
from earth to the fastness of light;
now come to that time of life
when our bones begin to wear us,
to settle our flesh in final shape

as the drying face of land
rose out of earth’s seamless waters.
     I dreamed once, long ago,
     that we walked among day-bright flowers
     to a bench in the Brisbane gardens
     with a pitcher of water between us,
     and stayed for a whole day
     talking, and drinking the water.
     Then, as night fell, you said
     ”There is still some water left over.”
We have one day, only one,
but more than enough to refresh us.

At your side among the graves
I think of death no more
than when, secure in my father’s arms,
I laughed at a hollowed pumpkin
with candle flame for eyesight,
and when I am seized at last
and rolled in one grinding race
of dreams, pain, memories, love and grief,
from which no hand will save me,
the peace of this day will shine
like light on the face of the waters
that bear me away for ever.  

Gwen Harwood