#80 Kevin Brophy 'fragment from the endless poem: for Lyn Hatherly'

‘Magpies aardle

cars wake with a small snore’ – Lyn Hatherly (1945-2016)

When a poet with a poet’s eye, heart and mind

Dies we know that she could only have been

Made by another poet under the female moon

on a planet where the stones that take a million

years to emerge are the abrasive eggs of a womb

burning with images of life and visions of love.

When love shapes work, when living breathes

its warm mist on the frosty mind; when the poet

never leaves her poem; when the poem has gone

so far inside her that she need never spell it out,

we know she has done the work that gods have

always dreamed of doing. None of this we know

can save her from being cast precisely from the cliff

or save her from being shot like any bird from its sky

leaving everything she was unseen.

When she listened to the day waking up beside her

it was there falling in love with her all over again

with its magpies, streets, cars and gardens crowding up

to be in her poem with her, the endless poem

of love and grief and parting.