Emptiness
By Anthony Wade
A slow maturing grain gathered on a child’s sunny holiday
a half century later became a brain-destroying tumor.
Gathered around you on your final watch for death
were sons, Mother, sister, husband,
your remaining family, and friends in number.
a half century later became a brain-destroying tumor.
Gathered around you on your final watch for death
were sons, Mother, sister, husband,
your remaining family, and friends in number.
Another sun-filled Sunday afternoon
but this toxic with apprehension,
or perhaps enhanced expectation,
when without warning you noisily stopped,
all breath in the room silently stilled.
Several breathless stretching minutes,
until lightly as a wingless wren stealing away,
something invisible, unseen yet surely perceived,
seemed to rise from your now quieted face,
your mother prayerfully convinced it was your soul.
Only a pale effigy silently still remained,
an anguished space, an embraced emptiness,
with no truth of you but in the mind
of those who had kept tearful watch,
and for those you still remain achingly absent.
Anthony Wade is a graduate lawyer with a master’s degree. An Irish national, he was educated in England and also worked in the Netherlands and speaks Dutch. He is an emerging poet with two poems published this year in The East Cork Journal. He is an active member of the Midleton Writers’ Group, East Cork, Ireland. He now lives by the sea in East Cork with his (second) wife, Pamela, and a very dim and loved marmalade cat, Basil.