| From West by Northwest.org Arts & Letters Poem: Child Burial By Paula Meehan Mar 9, 2005
Your coffin looked unreal, fancy as a wedding cake. I chose your grave clothes with care, your favourite stripey shirt, your blue cotton trousers. They smelt of woodsmoke, of October, your own smell was there too. I chose a gansy of handspun wool, warm and fleecy for you. It is so cold down in the dark. No light can reach you and teach you the paths of the wild birds, the names of the flowers, the fishes, the creatures. Ignorant you must remain of the sun and its work, my lamb, my calf, my eaglet, my cub, my kid, my nestling, my suckling, my colt. I would spin time back, take you again within my womb, your amniotic lair, and further spin you back through nine waxing months to the split seeding moment you chose to be made flesh word within me. I'd cancel the love feast the hot night of your making. I would travel alone to a quiet mossy place, you would spill from me into the earth drop by bright red drop. By kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland from The Man Who Was Marked By Winter, 1991 © Copyright 2000-2004 by West by Northwest.org |
