The garbage trucks wake me early.
Even my little cat is still asleep.
(She’s deafer than me.) I wake into
the immediate knowledge of his death,
my old friend, my soul-brother – we
could tell each other anything, every
thing, and also we didn’t need to –
unlike other deaths, when sleep gave
an escape from which I then had to
realise all over again.
When he visited
that night, before I found out he’d died,
I was half asleep already, didn’t then
recognise it was him (well we hadn’t
met in person for many years, though
we texted and were always available
to each other) only that it was a man,
tallish, not one of my usual visitors, but
someone I seemed to know very well …
I fell asleep not knowing yet, but feeling
safe in his regard, his calm affection.
This is one of a series of daily poems I'm doing this year as a 'Book of Days' and posting to Instagram and facebook – this one already slightly edited since. It's also being shared with Poets and Storytellers United for Friday Writings #100: El Dia de Muertos.
In Australia we don't have a Day of the Dead. (Many Aussie schoolchildren have now started celebrating Halloween, on the same date as the Americans do – which is the wrong season of the year here, the beginning of summer instead of winter; also they don't seem to really get what it means apart from the fun of dressing up and eating lots of free sweets.)
This newly written poem, though, obviously has some relationship to the topic.
