Requiescat 10 - Anniversary Poem by Michael Maxwell Steer

There are dimensions of life in another person
we cannot possibly know, even with someone
like a mother, to whom we're as intimately bound.
While she was alive I could not decode mine:
our lives were too entwined - an apple unsliced,
a knot whose interstices could not be unpicked.

A year later I begin to understand …
the degree to which her life was ruled by fear:
the unselfconfidence that held her back from change:
the little girl whose aim was invisibity:
unable to match the speed of her sharp-witted mother.

As a son I couldn't make these things alright.
Even if I'd understood, it would have taken
precise insertion of an epic fulcrum
to have moved or opened up her heart.

We are to beware of our desire in youth
lest by mid life we achieve it. Equally
we must engage with hidden fears, for if we
do not look them in the eye we're more than
likely to manifest a shadow reality
painfully intertwined with what is good.

To be unable to uncouple our desire
and dread is to feed fear with the energy
latent in every breath we take.


The last of a sequence, written a year after the death of my mother: : 24/05/2008