Sleep of Death
Poems about death and dying
by Diana Neutze
No More
My begonias were waterlogged
all winter; yet they recovered
and put forth new growth.
As their flowers opened to flame,
my son's life ended.
He was not granted another spring.
Completed
It was before dawn
the hospital summons
telling us it was time.
A last journey through shuttered streets.
The dying had been gradual;
but now like a frayed rope,
the tension of life could no longer hold.
All that was left, a body in an empty bed.
It was completed.
Wayside crosses
Wayside crosses mark an ending,
a weeping of families,
stunned with grief.
They had not understood
that every departure may be the last.
The inner road has its own markers
for grief and loss,
like the dry waking to the realisation
that henceforth and for ever
light will fall differently,
that on this very day, this Friday
I have entered a changed world.
I visit the cross that marks his leaving
only in my mind. On certain days
I need to throw a handful of earth
to ensure he sleeps in peace
who will not wake to morning.
Demeter's Lament
She mourned for her lost child
and would not be comforted.
Through the bitter days,
winter was in her heart,
glaciers and driven sleet
the companions of her grief.
The gods pitied at last the frozen wastes
and released Persephone
but the tell-tale pomegranate seeds
ensure year after year
a re-enactment:
nights lengthen, sunlight wavers
as Demeter waits out her daughter s exile.
Throughout the ages, mothers weep
enduring the blizzards of grief,
but the lost child has eaten
too freely of the underworld food
and cannot return to celebrate
the awakening spring.
The waiting vigil has no end.
A hand stretching
Letting go feels aggressive;
a callous letting fall.
To take the feelings most fragile
to the heart- my son's first breath,
the agonising rattle of his death-
and then deliberately shatter them.
That is a violation.
But maybe there is another way:
not clinging possessively
so the fingers have to be prised apart
but a hand stretching outwards
palm uppermost
and the fingers opening to the sky.
Instead of a violation, an offering,
an enlargement of the soul.
Goodbye
She lay there, eyes closed, arms gently
by her side; she didn't look asleep.
Is it the absence of life
or the presence of death
that makes the difference?
There's a dimension missing,
like a line drawing of a Rodin bronze
or a black and white reproduction
of a Matisse red interior.
She should have had a clutch of children
a home of clutter and originality;
instead, her only offspring were
discarded needles
and a pile of empty bottles.
I mourn her life more than her death
yet it was her life and she was used to it;
maybe she felt free and untrammelled.
As I bury the ashes of the little sister
who once cut her fringe
with the pinking shears
I pray it may have been so.
No longer
It had felt like an always;
right from my beginning
that was how it was.
He was before me on the road
and I could never catch up;
but now he is no longer here.
I am narrowing the distance.
Softly
The day she died was a day
like any other.
The cat ambushed a fallen walnut
and wrestled it into submission;
the little girl over the road
wept her painful four year old tears;
the sun set behind the crab apple tree.
Dying had suited her;
she had known how it would be
for several months
and it was as if that knowing,
by resolving her uncertainty
had set her free.
And so, just as a morning
of showers and blustery winds
eases, towards afternoon,
into a clear sky and late autumn sunshine,
in her last dying weeks,
she relaxed into gentleness.
Fare Forward
i.
The dead woman in my dream
vibrates with living,
remembers past happiness,
longs towards the future,
makes death look easy.
As if for the one dying
there's no shift in awareness
just a different plane
while we, the stay-at-homes,
are left with an aching void.
For us, it's a dying.
For her, a journey with scarcely
a hiatus between here and there,
only a catch of breath
before a new tomorrow.
ii.
He had to go alone
on the journey away from sunlight
lemon scented gums
and the flight of birds.
We could not keep him company;
instead we sent messages,
a scattering of postcards,
a shroud of words draping<,br/>
the silent coffin.
Silence
Tribute to Jacqueline De Pré
The cello's song is silenced,
golden notes faltering;
it's like an amputation,
a stump in its rawness spasming.
She was outside the music
excluded
as she lay dying.
Her friends played her out,
the notes of a great concerto,
a counterpoint to her laboured breathing.
The cello's song is silenced.
Out of Touch
In other centuries
living would have been nearer death.
Dying would have been easy
not today's choked obscenity;
after winter's pall
each new spring would have celebrated
a hopeful blossoming
new life where old seeds had fallen.
We're out of touch with that resurgence
do not associate bluebells,
and a blackbird's song
with the body in the silent coffin.
Conveyor Belt
It's all over in a trice:
an old woman in a retirement village
dies and the family have one week
to clear her away.
The funeral flowers are in their first bloom
but in one week the apartment
must be emptied, cleaned, sanitised.
The shadow of her careful walk still hovers,
the fragrance of her window sill herbs,
the walls still resonate with the sound
of her voice and laughter.
One little week to dispose of a life.
Where will her ghost walk?
11 September
i
On this September morning,
my fish are silent
and tulips open to the light.
I grieve for the outrage,
condemn the perpetrators,
reluctant, all the same, to acknowledge
I live in a world
so malignantly skewed.
But the world is balanced:
my having here entails
a not-having there,
my uneven life empties
other lives elsewhere
neighbours, at a distance, pay the price.
I cannot escape contamination.
Insecurity, a trickster shadow
is now slouching behind each one of us.
Terrorists, freedom-fighters,
range at their own behest
and change, of the utmost violence,
may well be the only permanence we know.
Contained in my tree-walled garden,
far removed from the harshness
of world currents
I hurl questions at the universe:
We are so many
how can we live without rules?
How can there be a mediator
when there is no trust?
Or a reconcilement, when each side claims
the only valid point of view?
Either/or means if I'm right
you must be incontrovertibly wrong
and I am justified in convincing you
by what ever means;
indeed, your very dying glorifies
my cause immeasurably.
Meanwhile, a thrush's song sweetly pierces
the spring morning cold,
three starlings, undeterred, bathe vigorously.
The wind and the rain
We believe we are invincible,
adolescents in a fast car
driving down the highway of life
"Power is money," we declaim
with no thought of the seed,
the surging of bird song,
or the sea pounding against innocent lives.
One death, our own death
is not enough;
it takes a drowning disaster,
whole villages roiled and seethed
in a cauldron of deaths
to make us understand .
For Better for Worse
Every morning the war news:
our victories, their defeats,
a ground offensive
like a dubious marriage
with no date set,
invitations out, presents received,
an exchange of missiles;
then coyness, failure of commitment
leading to further delays
before the promised consummation:
an orgasm of death
upon the desert sands.
The dying is the same
Enemies of race and religion
cut down like a stand of trees;
but the dying's the same.
Although living, they talk
a different tongue,
no need now of interpreters,
only the one language of death
there for the speaking.
It abides unchanging,
even as generations wither
and time accumulates.
Privilege
Matchstick people die in the Sudan,
mad men place bombs
in crowded shopping areas
for maximum carnage,
limbs torn off, strewn carelessly
blood and tears mixed with screams.
Others look away from injustice.
Yet in my garden
the sun shines peacefully
on a deep pink hyacinth,
my walnut is hosting sparrows
like an exotic fruit.
If I'ds had to stifle
all that was good in me
would even sunlight and shadows
fall differently?
News item
Take two classes of school children,
imagine them grown-up,
transport them to Iraq
and blow them to pieces.
Consider family, friends, neighbours,
colleagues left gazing
into the black hole of violence.
What sort of life?
And how many are left?
Witch Fever
I am living out
my final days in gentleness,
with a cat and a handful of healing herbs
till witch fever rages across the land.
Accused of satanic espionage,
I qualify for the ducking stool.
The prize for surviving
a watery grave is death by burning,
a torment of flame
in exchange for the lonely years.
Life's Tapestry
A malign thread, a warp
towards violence,
runs through life's tapestry:
drenched with cold, a wax eye
shudders and lies still;
an arthritic knife
turns in the hip;
overtaken by a procession
of tiny strokes, an old woman
looks on helplessly;
as the hill's shadow darkens
the water, a whale gushes
red paint blood.
On our own
Dying is so singular:
In the end, I am the one
who has to turn away
from the cherry tree in full flower
so I need to sharpen
my awareness and truly see
then it will no longer matter
whether dying is a journey away from
or a journey towards,
life's closure, or a new beginning.
Images of death
Take, for instance, these images of death:
a cloud disappearing
into a clarity of sky;
a walnut leaf mulched
into tomorrow's garden;
a musical note
absorbed back into silence.
But these all lack the human
ingredient of egotism.
We do not like
such repeated refrains,
deny endlessly
the greatness that marks
our beginning and our end.
No Tomorrow
There is a popular bromide.
Death resembles sleep,
so, if you don't fear the one
there is no need to fear the other.
But sleep has an ever present tomorrow.
In the sleep of death
there will be no heartache
or thousand natural shocks.
There will be no dreams
but there still will be
no tomorrow.
As the hand of death beckons
the life force in me grows stronger.
Friendships intensify, books invite
and music offers consolation.
I identify
with the ailanthus
establishing itself in the crack
between two paving stones,
with the geranium shoot
in the forgotten courtyard.
Irresolute
My hand, like Lear's, smells of mortality.
I have walked with death;
that makes me an uneasy companion.
If I want to share my story
I have to accost some unwitting passer-by;
no wonder the listening'sirresolute.
We can accord Munch's screaming woman
a distant compassion
when she lives on the other side of town;
it s another matter if she moves in next door
Loving
If this day were to be
my last, I would die
loving
the long shadows of autumn
as light filters through the apricot tree;
celebrating
the chattering flight of a fantail
rejoicing
in the architectural splendour
of a Bach fugue,
arch after musical arch soaring upwards.
Not today
Today is not a day for dying.
Throughout the world, even so,
people, out of choice or necessity,
are facing their own death.
But today in the spring sunshine
with the cherry blossom
opening to the sky
is too full of promise.
I cannot control necessity
but I would prefer to die
on a grey day of early winter
or even at midnight
when the last living breath
can ease into death the way
a child falls suddenly asleep.
The Tomorrow
The tomorrow when I will be dead,
there still will be
a lilting blackbird's song
the light-refracted iridescence
of a spider's web
but I will not feel the lack.
It's now, when the day's last sunlight
flames horse chestnuts against a darkening hill:
there's the yawning ache at a remembered loss.
Tomorrow will be different.
Possibility
If I died tomorrow, what would
happen to the poems in my head?
Words are seminal,
so next spring would my grave
be decorated
with a tapestry of phrases?
Living will
I have just signed my life away.
Pneumonia may carry me
to my death any time it chooses,
in a year or two, next year,
even just before Christmas.
That maintains the fiction.
But how about the end of this month,
which is already half gone?
The fiction becomes a fact
imbued with feeling,
a horror story that has come true.
Readiness
i.
I don't want to be groping in the dark
no point in travelling to a new country
with my eyes closed;
I need to see what is there
or, at least, see
that there is nothing there
for me to recognise.
Otherwise, it will be like
the five blind men and the elephant.
ii.
As my breath gets shorter
the point of departure gets nearer.
I need to decide
what to take with me:
the tenderness of a baby sparrow feeding,
or my garden
filled with the prayer of singing.
iii.
It seems worth trying
life's assignment, now I am old,
before the final upheaval,
could be like writing a poem:
a watching, a waiting, a listening.
There's no need for rush;
this morning, the first
of the deep yellow daisies
opening to the sky.
It was the dream that taught me:
watching an earthquake ripple the land.
No panic, no intervention
just a patient witnessing.
iv.
A life is like the weather:
days of halcyon calm
followed by pelting rain.
The storm of my life
will shortly be abated;
I am blowing myself out
over the rim of the world
where the weather begins and ends.
I do not want to die before spring.
Even as I try to learn
the lessons of life's ending,
my garden defeats me;
every plant, each cadence of birdsong
speaks of the future.
v.
There is a vanishing point in my garden
beyond two leaning trees
I can look out into a patch of sky,
An emblem of hope,
the emerging from confinement
into open space and clarity.
vi.
Death shadowed by entropy
might suggest a collapsing inwards;
but, cocooned as I am
in old age and disability,
I find myself yearning towards that open sky
as if my dying might bring
transformation and the freedom of flight .
Eternal sleep
The eternal sleep on the head land
with the sound of gulls
the wind and the rain;
but there's no going back, that's the trouble.
The essence of me has been distilled
from years of watching and listening.
It is compounded of the colour
showing in a tulip bud
or a thrush's song at evening.
I try to concentrate on the here and now
but I do not get it right.
My concentration is fuelled by love
which means possessiveness.
Like Faust I want the moment
to stay for ever,
like Othello I would die
in that moment.
I am bound on a wheel of attachment,
there is no easy letting go.
On the edge
Nearly a full year of living on the edge,
a year of inner farewells:
the unfinished book,
a friendship never to be completed,
my springtime garden,
a drift of white lilac
and a poignancy of cherry blossom
against an evening sky.
The year is turning.
Will the years to come contain
the same counterpoint of grieving wonder?
Subversion
Here are the opening lines:
It is not the final encounter
that I dread
but the stages leading up to it,
the day by day attrition.
The poem was meant to continue
with a meditation
on Macbeth's "sere and yellow leaf "
but the free wheeling mind
threw up an image
of a tree in my garden,
not just green in its fullness,
but the skeletal beauty
of the winter tree.
This was no death,
no line with a beginning and an end.
The poem, like my garden,
had subverted me.
With a little patience
It has been said: "we are all of us
dying, with a little patience."
But patience is exactly
what we do not have:
we want to change the future,
we want the future without delay;
unlike my garden where,
in mid autumn,
camellia buds appear
unperturbed by the long wait
before the flowers open to flame;
I am dying
with a great deal of impatience.
There is a time for every season
under the sun,
but I want my own time,
not the time it takes.
Impatience is my hallmark.
Retreating
The vanishing point in my garden
is almost obscured
by a tunnel of leaves.
On a day of high wind
the openness of sky
is reduced to a pinpoint of light
glimpsed through lashing branches.
Furthermore, one thing is certain:
there will be no Caesarean death.
I was lifted into life
without a struggle
but my dying will be more arduous.
I am already experiencing
the teasing labour pains of death.
Given the odds are so uneven,
it would be easier to await
my ending in the gentleness of repose.
But, as I have lived, so I will die:
fiercely and with full intent.
The Unknown
In the days when the earth was flat
was it considered limitless
infinity backwards and forwards?
Or did the sailor set out
into the unknown
unsure whether he would arrive
at an ultimate boundary?
As I approach my final years,
I am facing the same ambiguity:
where is my beginning, where is my end?
My ancestral beginning
is lost in the mists of time.
Of my caesarean birth
I have only a fictionalised account;
my mother's pain
and my own outrage
at the abrupt eviction
have been edited out.
As for my ending:
like the sailor venturing
into the unknown, I do not know
whether I will achieve a landfall.
Only a Book
I'm at the final chapters;
But I am not the writer
of my lifes story,
only a character within it,
and characters do not know their end.
Imagine if Pip had known all along
who his benefactor was.
his expectations would have been
vastly different.
I do not know for certain.
but unless there's a bizarre
twist in the plot,
I am coming to a resolution.
So I am cramming my days
with friends, ideas, music, beauty
till I am overflowing.
But my days are filled as well
with the ache of departure:
autumn leaves bright
with this morning's rain
against the long shadows
of darkness and death:
the poignancy of grief.
No matter what the end,
my life s story must stand on its own;
long ago my son was written out.
There will be no sequel.
Thresholds
Three score years and ten,
the allotted time-span
seventy years containing a life;
and there once would have been a belief
in the great words of the Mass:
resurrection of the dead
and life everlasting.
Dying would have meant passing over
a threshold, like Mr Valiant-for-Truth
when he crossed the river of death,
leaving on one bank the strains
and repetitions of living
and wading, half-swimming
towards the other bank
where glory and sounding trumpets
awaited him.
Secularisation has changed
our way of thinking;
we no longer take account of thresholds.
The balance of living and dying
has been skewed; life is too heavy,
like a child on a seesaw
endlessly waiting to be raised up.
Shortly, I will turn seventy
and in the weeks, months, years
that are left to me, I must sharpen
my awareness of thresholds
so that in my dying, like Rilke's swan,
I may leave on dry land
life's clumsiness
while I slide effortlessly
into the waters of death
and the trumpets ring.