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Myra Schneider

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Lavender

With a sachet of lavender secreted inside it
the purple bag is plump as a small bird's
breast, echoes your voice, its restful
clarity. When I slide my thumb down
the velvet underside a sense of psalm

fills me and dark cat night sidling in,
fitting the mound of herself to
a human back. I picture tension easing
in the day-to-day shifts we make
with those we're knitted to. Though I'm weak

the emperor purple gloves my skin
awake, rallies the brain's metropolis, sends
pungent messages to the pulsing townships.
For months my braced body's fought
the indiscriminate battalions sent in to rout

any cancerous cell filching a plot
of land but now it's flagging, wants
to hunch in a ditch, weep at its wounds.
Useless to wish frailty was a boiler suit
I could unbutton - it's married to the roots

of my hair, my blood. But this pouch
you chose for me, its insistent coolth,
raises a garden where flowering bushes
are blue-leaved and threaded with bee thrum,
raspberries spill ripeness on my thumbs.

 

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