Elizabeth Bewick
The Hat Trick
for Sean Street
Not being prone to doing things by halves,
I fell from top to bottom of the stairs
in Maundy Thursday's still unfriendly dark,
and I'm the same age as my mother was
when she fell down our cellar steps and died.
That was Good Friday and I can't forget
the shock of coming home and finding her
not there, and never there again, though I
have kept her by me all these wanting years.
The shock of finding I was still alive
was quite another thing, and jolted me
out of the clutch of apathy and strain
and into recognition of my worth –
not half the woman that my mother was
yet still content enough to be myself.
Now, as myself, what can I do but this,
finish this poem? – start another one? –
a hat trick of disasters circumscribed.
My mother and my sister, dying first,
have left me in a strange way obstinate
determined not to waste the breath they gave.
To live accepting death's beneficence
is living more intensely than before:
I had to fall downstairs to find that out.
I fell from top to bottom of the stairs
in Maundy Thursday's still unfriendly dark,
and I'm the same age as my mother was
when she fell down our cellar steps and died.
That was Good Friday and I can't forget
the shock of coming home and finding her
not there, and never there again, though I
have kept her by me all these wanting years.
The shock of finding I was still alive
was quite another thing, and jolted me
out of the clutch of apathy and strain
and into recognition of my worth –
not half the woman that my mother was
yet still content enough to be myself.
Now, as myself, what can I do but this,
finish this poem? – start another one? –
a hat trick of disasters circumscribed.
My mother and my sister, dying first,
have left me in a strange way obstinate
determined not to waste the breath they gave.
To live accepting death's beneficence
is living more intensely than before:
I had to fall downstairs to find that out.
Page(s) 8
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