THE SCAR

The old church was a wreck,

just bush timbers

and lime washed bags

with a few sheets of iron on the roof.

 

The only person

we ever saw there

was a drunk

with delirium tremens.

 

Karaknya and I

went there one day,

cut a mark on our thighs

with some broken bottle,

exchanged blood

and rubbed in red desert dust

up above where it would be seen –

our secret.

 

The mark has faded

over the years

but is still there.

 

Our lives

took us different ways,

to different places

and we lost each other.

 

I had always meant

to renew the friendship

some day – sometime,

but somehow never did,

even after I found where Karaknya was.

 

Perhaps I was afraid of what I might find

or just unwilling to take the risk.

 

Whatever,

Karaknya has gone now.

Just the scar

and the memory

remain.

From my window at St Andrews Hospital - August 2020

 

MY LITTLE SISTER

My little sister, my twin,

You were beautiful they say,

perfect, but dead, still-born,

strangled by my navel string.

 

My mother grieved for you

all her life,

never knowing where you were;

perhaps a hospital incinerator,

perhaps an unmarked grave,

perhaps unacknowledged in the foot of a coffin.

They all happened back then.

We have searched but never found you.

 

You are on our parents’ headstone now,

a memory without a name,

but there, a treasured memory.

 

Me?

We have twin grandchildren, 

girl and boy like us,

now young adults.

I take such joy in them

but grieve too

for what we might have known.

 

My little sister, my twin,

You were beautiful they say,

perfect, but dead, still-born,

and all my life

I feel that I have lived for us both.