Waiting
For Mark
After you died,
someone asked:
What was it like
in those final sixteen days
waiting for your son to die?
I was not waiting.
Wanting, yes. Hoping, yes. For more days.
Finding joy in small things,
a game of Camel Cup, your favourite songs
and singing them with you,
reading to you
talking,
until you could no longer do
any of those things.
And then I watched your breath
entering and leaving a body
that had endured so much
and still remained beautiful.
We became a circle around you
just as you had asked us to:
your mum, your dad, your brothers,
your best friend.
We went with you as far
as it was possible to go.
Susan Jane Sims most recent collection is Splitting Sunlight (Dempsey & Windle, 2019). She publishes poetry through her Dorset based publishing company Poetry Space . She has been a poet in schools for Threshold Prize and a judge for the Poetry by Heart competition. She was a Hawthornden fellow in 2018.