All of it
It’s thirty-four years since you let go
and we were pulled on downstream,
a Sunday then too. My brother texts me:
remembering happy times with father.
Yes, but how to separate them
from the rest, and do I want to?
You and I have had many talks since you died.
By the river, late afternoon golden light,
I saw you on the other side come down to the bank
to greet me, how you stood in silence,
listened to everything I had to say,
all the jagged unfinished business
and many times since – Samhain,
when the dead slip in easily,
you’re always the first I light a candle to,
feel it necessary, again, to tell you
the truth of you, unfiltered:
generous, selfish, excessive in every way,
a wake of unhappiness dragging behind you,
how you drank it down, dragged us under too.
We survived but we’re marked as survivors are,
water-stained, have had to find our own ways
out of the river, and mine is never to look away,
to see all of it, because that’s where you are,
surfacing towards me – in all of it.
Loved not in spite of, but through.
Sue Proffitt lives by the coast in South Devon. She has an M.A. (Creative Writing), is a Hawthornden Fellow and has been published in many magazines and competitions. She has two poetry collections: Open After Dark (Oversteps, 2017) and The Lock-Picker (Palewell Press, 2021). She is working on her third collection.