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 while, and each was understood.

Perhaps he’ll show us how to find

that piece of self we left behind

to make us whole again, like these

offerings from the crowding trees.

 

Leon Trainor

      Swarm

When you first showed me the dead bees,

side by side on a windowsill

inside your home, neither of us

knew whence they had come. They had died

gazing through the pitiless glass

at a world they’d never regain.

Things came to a head when you stood

on one as you got out of bed

and it shared its sting with your foot.

Something had to be done. The bees

were tracked to an outside vent

in the wall: they had colonised

the space between the double brick

and patiently came and went

as bees must, in their thousands,

filling the air with droning clouds.

Rather than dismantle your house,

fast becoming a honey pot,

you called a man from pest control

who told us we must kill the lot.

He pumped the vent with poison dust,

we watched the carnage. Those outside

the hive, trying to rejoin their kin,

their path blocked with bodies, were forced

to hover, helplessly alive

while their brethren died, deep within.

That image caused me to reflect.

Some would expect there’s no moral

to be drawn: everything dies

eventually, call it instinctual.

That could be precisely the point:

consider then the beauty of

their willingness to die, joined

as one in an affinity

like binding love, even to death.

Instinct, like passion, can survive

beyond the boundaries of life.

Perhaps that is what Love will be

in its final state when we

reunite, beyond final breath

with no more need of speech or touch

or self. May we desire as much.

Leon Trainor

 

 The Thirst

You placed pots around your back yard,

beside trees, where your animals

can drink, and you top them up

each morning, rising with the sun.

In one corner, set apart

a ceramic pot serves the bees.

From first light until night falls,

from swarms and hives they interrupt

the never-ending chase: pollen,

nectar, both can wait, they’ve begun

to queue, the pot rim swollen,

every bee knows where it is:

they dip into the water, sip

forty seconds, take off again

to whence they’ve  come.  In such a chain

of being, nothing is ever slight:

to anticipate another’s thirst

is a vital link, and to give

sustenance is the sort of love

that informs the universe.

Thus your response to living things,

tangible as the water poured

for them; or the bees you brought

to my attention, knowing I’d write.

Leon Trainor