Postscript

Dusk on the third day of the Buddhist feast
of Obon and toro nagashi gets underway
across Japan. Their shore leave over,
the spirits of the dead are bid farewell
until that time next year, when ritual
grants them reprieve again. The candle boats
are set afloat, the surface of the rivers lit,
flotillas flicker off into the dark, and on.

These images come back to me the week
after my mother’s death, listening as she reads
her favourite poems. I edit each recording
with the same detached respect
the undertaker showed washing her body.
I drain each clip of hiss and static,
nip and trim all hum and crackle, soothe popped plosives,
then ensure that each caesura’s uniform,
bind them in crisp audio winding sheets
and set them sailing off through cyberspace.

It’s now a waiting game. Her future lies
in someone else’s hands – an accidental
necromancer trawling YouTube for a poem,
whose choice summons my mother’s voice
to flicker back to life again, and warm
a stranger’s room somewhere. Till then
she’s neither here nor there.

For months no radar sifting those cold seas,
identifies the drifting ghost ship fleet.
And then a hit! A woman writing from
Newcastle (not my mother’s home beneath
the Mournes but its namesake across the water).
has chanced upon her reading Heaney’s Postscript.
She proffers comfort, signs off simply ‘Dawn’.

Paul Moclair is from Northern Ireland. He completed an MA in Writing Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre, QUB in 2025. He has been published in The Ogham Stone, Dodging The Rain and in two Poetry In Motion Community anthologies.