How I Deal

Child me saw ghosts

no-one else could see.

Night after night

I lay rigid with fear,

until at last I wrote

the poem of the ghosts.

Then I owned them.

It made me brave.

When I fell in love,

my poems were pink roses

soft with romance,

and my poems

were yellow roses

bright with celebration,

and my poems were

deep red roses rich with lust.

When love fell out with me,

my poems curled

into balls of weeping,

or shrieked their rage

or hissed poison.

Some brandished knives.

And they brought me out

to the other side.

When my first cat died —

my dearest, from kitten

through 18 fond, full years —

I made poems of her life

and poems of her death.

Readers said, 'A noble animal'

and, 'You can be a great poet'.

I was glad I served her well.

When government

betrayed the people,

and we marched

and we demonstrated,

my poems raised their fists and yelled.

The fire in their bellies

inflamed other minds and hearts —

but those poems burnt out fast.

When my first great love

died suddenly, shockingly, young,

my poems took me on long walks

to talk to the sky, to send

invisible messages aloft

and visible ones to the world.

I wrote him such fine poems

after he was dead!

When our Mother called to us

and we saw she was hurt

and could be dying,

when we knew we were killing off

whole tribes of her other children,

my poems evoked green Nature,

a blue, unique planet,

and the great love of the Mother.

When my husband Andrew,

love of my life thus far,

died at his time, old,

my poems held my hands

and mopped my tears.

'This is right,' they said,

'But you are allowed to grieve',
and afterwards brought me peace.

Prompt for 'Poems in April' at 'imaginary garden with real toads: how to keep balance in the face of life's exigencies?