Before She Went
She rests in music all day long
Jazz, Opera, Nationalist folk,
The closest thing to silence I can find here.
If she raised her head,
she would see Tesco, a pub and the steelworks,
the new Wales,
rolling out like steam,
But instead she watches the sky
As an airplane splits it in two.
Her legs become just rumours under the duvet, and
her skin stops fitting,
That’s because it’s mass produced
she explains,
Its transparency seeps through into her bones,
And when she hoards enough will to
lift her arm
The moonlight slips through it
– salt dissolving –
Where do I end?
She whispers
As the nurse jumps
– I did not see you there,
my dear,
what with all this light.
She peers at my face
Breaking into her vision
and says
“Picasso, Van Gogh, Toft.”
You have grown so much,
you say to me,
As we lay our hands on her
our fingers becoming a roof
keeping her anchored
for just a moment longer.
And so she brings us together again,
in dying as in living,
As she had before the Swansea ocean,
before whose great exhales
our young hearts shook to,
until we gripped her hand
fingers wrapped around her thumb,
her skin the softest material
I had ever felt,
its constant beat so strong
it was if I held all of her
in the tiny shadow of my palm.
Sam Parr is an English with Creative Writing Graduate from the University of Birmingham. He is currently an intern at Birmingham Children’s Hospital, and writes in the breathing space before work in the morning