1.
I had just turned five. Dusty light
in the front room of our terrace house.
An empty hearth. I see again the nib pen,
a birthday gift from you, its glass stem
filled with shiny, lime-green water.
When I threw it against the iron grate
the locked-in, quicksilver bubbles – the bubbles
of my childhood rage – released into the air.
Again, I hear your soft, heartbroken words:
'She doesn't love her Mummy.'
In that year, my infant brother had died.
The steel nib lay among slivers
in the cleaned grate: the air full of dust motes;
your grief, unanswered love; and my anger.
2.
The animus of early teenage years –
classic; written into the script:
hurts that stirred your rare anger.
Then you watched, without words or power
as I entered the tunnel I'd walk through for a decade.
Of what use was anger then, to either of us?
Your own years in the tunnel came later:
Bex powders and bingeing; and again,
no words. Trapped in annealed distance
I hardly knew of your despair.
But how could that be? You, so swift
to read whatever pain I felt –
the loving believer, the faithful one;
teacher, lifelong, of acceptance.
3.
In mid-life before I learnt
how to answer your care.
It's 1989,
the first year of your widowhood:
you've just undergone a triple bypass.
En route to the hospital, I stop
in St Kilda Road and ask myself
if I can do this – attend at this rebirth,
help to bring you back.
Then you are there before me –
sheathed in white, emerging still
from risky oblivion; but above the sheet,
your thumb raised in the sign of hope, good luck,
your eyes, deeply clear
never for a moment doubting life, or me.
Diane Fahey is the author of twelve poetry collections, most recently The Stone Garden: Poems from Clare, shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize in 2014. A House by the River, based on six years spent with her mother as her carer, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann in 2015. Her website is dianefaheypoet.com