July's White Lily
For my Mother
Strange how things about the garden
are unchanged, how nothing is attentive
to your dying.
The ground’s beetle, stones, and the green sap of summer
do not shrink
from the heat of tomorrow.
Birds still jab and gibber
in the rowan tree, in the rude, red berries
of jostled cluster.
And in the sunlit glitter, in the gullies of the branches,
raspings of magpie
sear the thin shafts of my bone.
Goldfish, unthinking in their fat and flouncing
colours
still waffle at the pool’s edge,
moon about and mouth the pale drifting of flakes
I scatter.
It is of no concern.
July’s white lily has opened on the water now:
July, July, the long summers’ month of your coming
and your going;
and tomorrow
I will lay the bloom among your sprays of flower
knowing how the petals will fold –
even before the slow closing of the curtain
hides you
from the tremble of my gaze.
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