By Deborah Seddon
Grief doesn’t come in five stages
Grief is a mess
you need to keep wiping up.
A troll with a spade
lurking to wallop you in doorways.
An ambush, a panic attack,
while waiting at a boiling kettle.
Yesterday you were angry all over again.
Today it was dark when you woke.
You pulled on a woolly hat
and got back into bed, wept.
Because you miss your mother
but also you fear you’ve become her –
an old woman going to bed in a woolly hat
because she is all alone and it is so cold.
Jy huil. Jy huil. It is clearer in her language.
The sky pebbling the ground with frozen hurt.
Perhaps you are the one who has died.
Perhaps her death has killed you.
O-o-h child
O-o-h child,
lifting the record-player arm with a trembling hand,
laying your head next to the speaker.
Your father is at war,
Nixon is a crook, and that naked child
running from the napalmed forest,
out-screaming Munch, is only one of many.
O-o-h child, it’s not going to stop,
this wash of death on the shore each morning.
For where can they live?
Refugees crammed into boats.
Homes all wrecked by sonic boom and flame.
Men and women suffocating side by side
in containers on trucks and on ships.
Running out of air in the darkness.
Running away into their airless futures.
O-o-h child, the people can’t breathe.
The police are still pressing on their necks.
And just the other day they shot a little boy,
with his pockets full of biscuits,
but no one goes painting his name.
O-o-h child, look around, things aren’t going to get easier.
The young never had your kind of hope.
The old ones took for granted
the lake at dusk, flies and fish
rising to the rippled surface.
The beauty of the world unassailable.
Trees still shed enough pollen
on one summer day for a thousand orchards
but there won’t be enough bees left to cope.
- ‘Grief doesn’t come in five stages’ and ‘O-o-h child’ are taken from Magnitude, Deborah Seddon’s debut poetry collection published by Dryad Press and launching this month. Seddon, an English lecturer at Rhodes University, will be reading from her collection at 7.30pm on Monday 13 October as the featured poet at Off The Wall, a Cape Town poetry platform that kept its online presence after Covid-19. Magnitude will be launched in Makhanda on 30 October at Amazwi.
- You can join Off The Wall via Zoom using this link: https://us05web.zoom.us/j/89955065083 (Meeting ID: 899 5506 5083, Passcode: 4ucS3b). Poet Stuart Payne will host the event.
