“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.” Shakespeare Macbeth
On a sunny afternoon I visit my mother in her residential aged care home. She has had a minor stroke. Speech and memory are difficult now. She struggles to complete sentences. Only a last desperate look from the whirlpool of memory reminds me of her love. Now all the pain, the madness of her days, the grief, the regrets, the loss, they are all imprisoned inside. There will be no final understanding, except in meeting her glance. Now habit and the simplest acts of caring, to wheel her through the aching sun, are all that we have left together.
Mr Cogito’s monster
lacks all dimensions
it’s hard to describe
it eludes definitions
it’s like a vast depression
hanging over the country
it can’t be pierced
by a pen
an argument
a spear
if not for its stifling weight
and the death it sends
you might conclude
that it was a phantom
a disease of the imagination
but it’s there
it’s there all right
it fills crannies of houses
temples bazaars like gas
it poisons the wells
destroys a mind’s constructs
covers the bread with mold
proof the monster exists
is offered by its victims
indirect proof
but sufficient
from Zbigniew Herbert, “Mr Cogito’s Monster”
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1 thought on “Sorrow”