Graeme Hetherington: Three Poems

Exorcism

 

As I played cricket with a golf

Ball in our yard, driving it hard,

A kitten strayed into its path,

And screeching, frantically intent,

Squeezed between weatherboard and ground,

 

A gap too narrow for my hand.

It must have died at once, since I

Heard nothing more until today,

Sixty years on, its miaow in

My head drove me to write this poem.

Graeme Hetherington

 

Upper Heights and Lower Depths

What heights remain beyond our reach

When dog whistle and tuning fork,

Straining to listen though we may,

Sound notes pitched too high for our ear,

Deserting us yearning to rise,

Freed from the confines of our lives?

Nor can we hear how far below

The scales a crow’s cawing might go,

Summoning to a fathomless

Black abyss, as Aeschylus in

His tragedies, at first much too

Profound to be understood with

Such measurelessly dark deep lines

As “cry sorrow, yet let the good

Prevail, man suffers to grow wise”,

Sang the ever-feuding Greeks down

Into the bottomless pit of

A vendetta, till all but drowned

In blood they learnt it’s better to,

With many a backward look and fall,

Climb out and up towards the stars.

Graeme Hetherington

In Memory of Dr Ivana Gajdošová 1944–2013

1.

 

My wife’s cancer meant

In our small flat she seemed to be

Forever in the lavatory.

I didn’t chicken out, but stayed

 

To comfort, shop, cook, wash-up, clean

And look on helplessly, a prey

To thoughts so shaming, deeply black,

So disillusioning, I did

 

My best to bury them with her.

Yet three years on, persisting still,

Denying me the heights from which

I used to idealise her as

 

A Madonna-like, golden-haired

Cardiologist caring for

Patients as Mary did for Christ,

Heart-felt they overwhelm me with

 

“All is of equal worthlessness”,

As when Swift, maddened by despair

Cut short a poem praising his pure

Love with “but Celia, Celia shits”.

 

2.

 

I walk as usual, now you’ve gone,

Leaf in hand, on slippery rocks

Around the bay, the siren-waves

Whispering as huskily as your

Broken Czech-English that I loved,

 

“Why not re-join me, stranded as

You are again in loneliness

I saved you from for twenty years?”

Afraid, I brush you off, crushed to

Bits by my tightly clenched damp palm,

 

And watch you blown into a sky

Dark as my mood, or float away,

Voice changing to an angry deep

Reproachful note I also knew:

“A poor reward for what I did!”

 

3.

 

Uneasy on a gloomy bush-

Bound track I re-lived childhood fears

Of cannibal Gabbett escaped

From Hell’s Gates in Marcus Clarke’s “For

The Term Of His Natural Life”,

 

Who running out of mates’ meat might

Wolf down the butterflies I loved,

When one lit golden as a patch

Of sunlight on my outstretched hand:

You, come back in this form to save!

 

That night I dreamt of you enthroned

On high before descending in

Haloed glory, the soles of your

Tensely arched feet walking on air

As white as Christ’s uplifted from

 

The sea to reach Peter in need,

As in a Sunday School image

Or painting by Tiepolo.

Then on the point of vanishing,

Showing the cleanest pair of heels

 

To the communist world you loathed,

Turning you saw me waiting in

Your packed reception room and crooked

Your doctor’s finger, summoning,

And I woke feeling purged of grief.

Graeme Hetherington