My Saving Grace is Poetry (Part 2) by Grace O’Reilly

Nine times out of ten I write about real things in my life. Because of this, I am able to be totally raw, which is both good and bad. With cooking you only need a little garlic and onion, and tears flow involuntarily. It’s brilliant to be able to evoke your reader’s feelings. Too much raw onion or garlic can overpower, causing heartburn or thrown in with other ingredients, mixed and made into something marvellous, or not. Cooking and writing are similar, just one uses words and one, food. Personally, I like to think of poetry as food for the mind and soul.

At the start of March, Dad passed away whilst my two sisters and mum and I were with him. He had been sick for a long time and when Mum rang, I hurried to the hospital. It was just horrible to see my Dad, or anyone for that matter, helpless, and just, there! I couldn’t believe that my dad was now on palliative care. Five days, of heartbreak watching him decline before our very eyes. It broke me as I could also see minute by minute, a little bit of my Mum died too, as we watched helplessly for the inevitable. I have spent the last few weeks and months writing, and poetry and journaling has and still is giving me a little comfort. I wrote this in January and edited it in February, we knew his surgery in January would only buy him some time, we just didn’t realise, how little. You can have all the money and fame in the world, but time and health can’t be bought.

Heartbreak

My heart aches

My insides feel like shattered glass

It hurts to breathe

Shallow gasps,

My eyes heavy, with tears and exhaustion

Watching someone you love deteriorate

Struggling for real breaths

Their delicate heart fragile

Watching helplessly

Waiting for their heart to break,

Stop for good, is heart-breaking in itself

And when that inevitable time comes

A part of my own heart will be chipped,

Gone forever

This next poem, I wrote just after Dad’s funeral. Emotional numbness is very surreal, and can only be temporary, if you are to get passed whatever it is that has made you numb or you are being numbed from. Otherwise, you are not living, you are merely, surviving. Tapping into music, reading and writing helps me, for others it can be drawing, painting, knitting, pottery, cooking, baking, gardening, and if it helps as a therapeutic remedy, well that is a start.

Dazed

Dazed

Living in a haze

This week has been a maze

Full of hectic craze.

I wish of all the days

Filled with hues of greys

And colourful bouquets

This time came with delays.

It didn’t, coming anyways!

Now all I have, is the sun’s rays

Bright stars where I gaze

As your body decays

Your soul dad, stays!

While the moon and shadow plays,

You are earth

You are air

You are water and fire

You are everywhere.

I am dazed

Keep hoping that this is a dreamer’s phase

But it’s not,

You, as I knew you are gone

While I watched my Dad slip further, and further away from us, poetry, was my Saving Grace. It was the one thing that I could do. Words! I sang to him while stroking his face. I spoke to him, holding his hands, moisturising them. I recited poetry, I knew by heart for him, and read from my very old, battered, yet treasured, and much-loved Robert Louis Stevenson poetry book ‘A Children’s Garden of Verses’. I read ‘The Moon’, (which I have rewritten in different words, it is called ‘Luna’), and ‘From a Railway Carriage’ amongst others. I also read him a poem, he used to recite to us many times, ‘Daisies’ by Frank Dempster Sherman.

Daisies

At evening when I go to bed

I see the stars shine overhead;

They are the little daisies white

That dot the meadow of the Night.

And often while I’m dreaming so,

Across the sky the Moon will go;

It is a lady, sweet and fair,

Who comes to gather daisies there.

For, when at morning I arise,

There’s not a star left in the skies;

She’s picked them all and dropped them down

Into the meadows of the town.

My Dad may be gone but this poem, I shall print out and frame and place proudly on the walls in my home as it reminds me of him. Mum is getting this poem put on his memorial cards. I will teach my children, and grandchildren this poem, and tell them Grandad Ollie, or Great Grandad Ollie used to say this to me and my two sisters when we were little and going to sleep, when he would tuck us in tightly, also saying, “don’t let the bedbugs bite”. He said that his mum, my paternal Granny, (Downes) used to recite it to him. I can keep that part of him going, and quite simply told that is how a poem becomes so very important, sentimental and timeless, as it came from a time in history.

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in Irish Poetry Therapy Network.