In Memoriam

Writing has been on hold for a while since the passing of my mother, Edna Taylor (nee Hambleton) on 13 January, aged 92. I take comfort from the fact that she didn’t suffer, but Mum leaves behind her a hole that I don’t think will ever be filled.

I thought I would share a poem that I read at her funeral. I wrote it a while ago, at the time not about anyone in particular, but it sums up my feelings now better than anything else I could come up with. 

Light Years
                                                                    
What trace of you is left on this blue earth?
You went from us in fire,
your carbon food for roses
long since plucked and thrown away.
 
I kept safe pictures, objects
and revered them, in the hope
they might retain some distillate of you.
In time I came to realise,
that what they hold is part of me.
 
What’s left, it seems, is space.
The gaps within this life,
this time, these places
that somehow keep the shape of you.
 
And space itself must hold you still:
on clear nights I scan the sky
and wish myself upon some distant world
where I might yet receive a dot of light
that found its way from you.