Words: Alice McCloskey (she/her)
The lilies you gave me are rotting softly on my windowsill.
As the light outside grows brighter,
it ushers in the quiet whispering caresses of early Spring.
Its breath is sweet and hopeful,
but still carries the cold scent of decay
as it flutters the pages on my bedside table;
Charlotte Mews: Selected Poetry and Prose.
Its date is outlined stiffly –
the rigid confines of your earthly life,
for me,
another birthday gift.
Lines of beauty, elongated with electric wit
forgotten though,
she was,
my mother tells me as she hands it to me
amidst the flurried embraces of
arms long parted.
Mine feel shaky, lightweight
with such a reminder of evanescence
hanging over the cracked ridges of a birthday cake,
over which we parted once more.
Charlotte Mews: Selected Poetry and Prose.
I open her up.
She is introduced through, by, around her unknownness
but how can she be obsolete,
when she is alive in every word?
She reaches out to me in her sadness, her joy, her pain;
‘Some nights, in bed, have grown cold to hear
That lonely passion of the rain
Which makes you think of being dead,
And of somewhere living to lay your head
As if you were a child again,
Crying for one thing, known and near
Your empty heart, to still the hunger and the fear
That pelts and beats with it against the pane.’
(The Fête, Charlotte Mews, 1916)
Each turning of the page is an absorption,
an interlocking of fingers,
a silent goodbye.
You gifted me a flower press along with the lilies.
In death,
they will become something new.
I hold close your cracked petals,
their carcasses embolden the supple fabric of a solitary, whining soul.
