Poetry by Jude Brigley

                         Alexander Rabb CC



Via Crucis

Norma Roach 1929-2020

1. At first, we talked of old times.
I read her snippets from my diary

and old detective novels, as I explored
my old home in some nostalgic fury.

We talked of the cracked stair rail
held by wire since 1929,

and of the china tea-set locked
in the cupboard, once the envy

of sisters. but no longer spread
on white linen tables, ready 

for high tea and home-made cakes.
We relived childhood misdemeanour

And how she went from a crowded
house to the occupancy, until now,

of one. ‘You should sell your house,’
she said and move back home.

The street is forever ours
in our vocabulary as we say

‘up the house’, ‘going home’
as if we were still those children

skipping down the terrace
and over the red step 

to noise and movement. 
And every day the nurse

arrived to undress and dress
her leg with precise calculation

while she made pleasantries
through the wincing pain. 


2. Where is Graham ? she asks. 
Do you mean Peter? I reply.
She always mixed up names.
We answered to the sundry 
nomenclatures as children,
as if we were an amorphous 
mass of loved ones but now 
we are entangled all as one.

She thinks I am her mother
Not so hard a step. Everyone
said I was like her in temperament
as well as bones. Are your sisters
all dead ? she asks 
but shakes her head,
knowing I am close but 
not sure who I am.


3. {i} I was afraid in childhood when she was ill,
 mostly with a migraine in a darkened room,
a bucket by her bed. Leave me alone,
she’d shout if the doorknob slightly turned. 

I don’t know who I am, she says
Or where I am. It can’t be right
to lose my mind and not my leg. 


3 {ii} When they made it clear 
she was going to die sooner
rather than postliminary, I felt 
a restless need to use the phone 
and talk it through. Then 
stopped and registered that 
I was dialling her. 


4. The men all died in hospital;
one of a broken leg, one gasping for air,
the last with a poison in his blood. 
Not so the women; 

one in the parlour with a bed 
brought down, calling my mother’s name, 
another in the kitchen
waiting for my mother to return, 

reading the paper, a cigarette
in hand not quite burnt out. 
The fire stoked. The table laid. 
They find the house the womb

to which they can return. 
My mother calls her own name, 
recalling her grandmother’s voice 
summon insistently from another  room 

and at this moment she is all of them. 


5. Although I put squeamishness aside
to watch the nurses change the bandages,
on legs that look bullet-ridden
 or have not escaped a burning,
at these last times when her frail
body is simply moved along the bed,
I have to leave and stand out on the door 
where she has stood to wave me off 
in a montage of tearful oscillations.
​

​

Jude Brigley is Welsh. She has been a teacher, an editor and a performance poet. She is now writing more for the page. She has been published in various anthologies and magazines including ‘Otherwise engage’, ‘Aubade’ and ‘Ariel Chart’. She didn’t think that she would be able to write about her mother’s illness and death but creativity should never be underestimated.