Brighid Schroer
A Six-Sonnet Sequence
1
I wonder what it would be like if I
knew that we weren’t going to die.
I could be steady, enduring as a stone,
not the flowed-through thing I am,
moving briefly in and gone.
And you and I would face each other,
slow to change, no hurry with no end.
Having all time to fill or leave unused,
would we become confused
or passionless and wise, no longer
needing, needing, wanting, needing?
And how would it alter
what we think we are together?
I’d be afraid to live with my mistake for ever.
2
Death will come. You and I both know
that we move briefly, swiftly through
before we’re gone. No more.
No further chance to change or grow.
Having so small a time, what must we do
to make the most of all that’s now?
I’ve seen so little of the world.
We’ll find where’s most important to explore,
then come back bronzed and reminisce,
walk arm-in-arm and laugh together,
drink good wine and make new music. Dare
to deepen, live at last, to risk
and so to love each other more
and — if we can — become more sure.
3
Death will come, and I’m afraid. Only bravado
talks of using well what’s left, and though
I try to puzzle through the meaning
of so short a span, it can never be enough.
I am a mouth, all of me a mouth
that shouts defiance, terror. I’m clinging
to life. I want to go on and on. I know,
but can’t. I cower, hunker down.
I kick and hurl myself against the fact, trying
for a way to grasp it. I feel a caving,
shrinking in my chest. It makes no sense.
I can change nothing. I find no recompense —
except to change myself, but that I can’t maintain.
And what of lives cut shorter, and in pain?
4
All my life I’ve been afraid of death,
not accepting, not understanding.
Nothing lasts, not health, not fortune.
Worth and meaning seemed to shrivel.
But now I’m closer with less life to live
I find to be arched round by death
frees me from fuss about the trivial
annoyances, and I am joyful.
We come unknowing, our time is brief,
and then we go. This wave we surf
collapses on the shore in tiny bubbles,
melting into sand and pebbles.
If we live full, free, together, what difference
which beach we break on into silence?
5
Who am I fooling? This thing, death,
is blackout, total goneness. Final.
A living creature shouldn’t know,
or feel it has a separate self. Earth
to earth, back to my emergence, my original.
I’d be better off not conscious I must go.
Men, women, children, die in earthquake,
flood or fire, are killed in war,
starve, trudge in broken lines, and sink
before they’ve had a chance to make
a life. And creatures everywhere are
put to death. I stand here on the brink
like all those others gone and going,
in dread, ankles caressed by the shoals of the dead.
6
When I walk in the fields I think how
I walk in my origins, my face their face,
my life theirs. They have spread under weather,
carried kingcups in floods from the river —
gleamed round by blackthorn, no plough
since farmed in strips, a Saxon trace.
This river, every tree and grazing cow
I pass, the streets and houses, all in place
and time, are parts of me. They share my source.
Before I was formed, before the land had shape,
we were. We cast no shadow, took no space,
companions in the absence of a preset now
with everything that was and is. We’ve come
together here. And so I see myself in them.
Photos by SL Granum
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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 512 • December 2021
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW