! Old Woman

We see you every day on the newsreels a face like the worn map of tragedy lined with a life of service that should have ended in an honoured peace among those you bore and love your hands reaching out to the TV camera begging for water, food or beseeching in some unrecognisable, ineffective local language, or cursing an enemy not visible who made a ruin of your home or being carried unceremoniously between urgent hands in some material from a bed that is no longer there or sitting bemused by life awaiting some unnamed help beyond request though never accompanied by your son who has found a greater cause than home, or age, and somewhere else… or, in the occasional poem - tended, your paper skin and jutting hipbones not unlike some starved chicken’s carcase described with painful love as if you only lived a living life in the past tense, beyond the verses, between the metaphors and yet, if we could only find words to describe what's still living, where pride hides, a pride too precious now in grief to speak, how you love those who are not here.. and yet, you’re there, alive or dead patient, proud, silent, and unnamed, in every poem that has ever been written and I salute you