Simon Charlton

 

 

At The Hour of Failing Light

 

for mum

 

She lay diminished

Age tarnished and worn

Beyond endurance, beyond hope

 

The room was a blue shadowed silence

Smelt faintly of sweat, of sleepless

Nights congealed in fear

 

There were faded flowers on the nightstand

The petals fallen, their pale delicacy

Slowly claimed by time’s corruption

 

The scent of stale water hung

On the torpid air, insisted of stagnancy

And terminal decay, obvious symbols

 

Yet no less potent for their simplicity

Their allowing for navigation between the

Awful paths of helplessness and despair

 

The stillness was huge

Barely a breath to disturb

Sorrow’s bruised tenderness

 

Shrunken now from the time of

Her dominion, from the time of

Her being the world entire

 

Her skin creased into fathomless depths

An exhaustion of flesh on pink sheets

Collapsed softly, yet mightily, from within

 

A concussive wracking cough that pain

Pinched her mouth and squeezed pitiless

Tears from her soft sorrowed eyes

 

Their gentlest brown now cataract scuffed

The colours of the world exhausted, their

Vibrancy paling to a mist-shrouded vagueness

 

Better surely the interior vision of a world

Now beyond retrieval, a world that yet

Trembled in her smile of barest animation

 

The room was overshadowed by something

More than the trees beyond the window

That something we know but fear to name

 

But let others speak of greater truths than

Here presented, at the hour of failing light

Metaphysical speculations are base intrusions

 

For she lay diminished

Age tarnished and worn

Beyond endurance, beyond hope

 

                     copyright © simon charlton

                                2010