VIII

Once I was a father
Death and birth came in the same instant
A life in waiting
Gone before it could find a path
A person of possibilities and could-have-been beauty
Is now a shadow who walks beside my elder son
I know despair’s depth, the agony
The mind’s incomprehension
That life can be so fragile, the ice so thin.
Because I know death I know life
Because I know love I know its loss
Because I have lost I know your loss
Motherloversisterbrotherchild of mine
You are not just another
Not an electronic projection on a TV screen
Howling in the rubble of life
Switched on and off on and off on and off.
Sarah, I fought for you because I felt for you
Our first meeting found you shriveled, cornered
But I knew that poor as you were
You felt maternal ambition and hope
Knew love and the springs that feed desire
Feared life quenched by a virus
HIV, HIV, HIV
Loves me, loves me not
Ronald, on the days that I find wings and fly
Tread in ancient walkways
Run on beaches as the day breaks to the waves’ endless symphonies
I know what you have lost
Charlene, I saw you die, imagined I saw a tear
Thought it was recognition
Slip across your eye. Half an hour later I told your friends
And watched them cry.
This is not the plague of yester year
The Black Death, the ‘bring out your dead’, the sulphur, the pox
By imagination we live and by imagination you deny
Extinguish names, hopes, millions and more
In word plays, make an epidemic into an imaginary
Because you won’t count its victims.
But I know our heroes, they are ordinary people
Not the giants that walk in children’s history books
But people with blood and sweat, shit and semen, contradiction, uncertainty and torture.
Heroism gets sanitized in history
Made black and white, turned into ants on a page
Rubbed clean like a teacher’s blackboard
In history our heroes lose their vitality
Life its romance, mystery, uncertainties
In death they become
Plastic toy soldiers in other people’s wars
Unable to answer back.

From Dawn at Kalk Bay, an auto and biographical poem (2007) by Mark Heywood