Verse Portraits: June 2008

This began as a game some bloggers played in 2008, to write about people who'd made an impact, in the same number of words as one's age, every day for a year. I did them less often and went on longer, adding one word each birthday. I stopped in 2016 and incorporated them into my main poetry blog. In 2019 I resumed the project and gave it its own blog again, with a new name, where it may unfold at its own (slow, intermittent) pace. I've labelled these verse portraits, but they're more like quick sketches: mere glimpses, impressions....

Sunday 29 June 2008

Mum

You were always inclined to denial.
How well we all knew that stare
looking coldly a little way past us
or into some internal distance,
that vaguing of eyes and voice.

During the day of your dying, I discovered
I had it too, the same inclination.
An inheritance, perhaps?
I walked and I talked in a sort of trance.
This is not happening, I thought. But it did.

[Poem #1]