Four Poems
To the Hospice
Now the cupboards by your bed
are empty. Having packed your gear,
those who love you rub your head,
hold your arm, shout encouragements
through this comatose envelope
that weighs on you, denying air,
stifling the person who you were.
So we await the ambulance;
our goal: get your body from here
to where it can relax its grip,
certain your soul is safe and free;
and we, leaving the hospital,
hear a solitary magpie call
out of sight in some distant tree.
Leon Trainor
Roadside Lilies
for Emma Di Nardo
Alongside the highway, lilies
that St Anthony might have held
in one hand (the radiant Christ Child
in the other) with crowding trees
closed in behind them when we pass.
You’d expect to find them in low,
flat, cultivated lands but no,
they hug the forest edge where
the trees interlock like the bars
of a cage. They are simply there.
Suppose he met the Infant Christ
while travelling in a dark wood
where they no doubt gently conversed
a…
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