Poetry Treasures – ‘Eightieth poem: Life after Death’ by Ted Hughes (1930-98) What can I tell you that you do not know of the life after death? Your son’s eyes, which had unsettled us with your Slavic Asiatic Epicanthic fold, but would become so perfectly your eyes, became wet jewels, the hardest substance of the purest pain as I fed him in his high white chair. Great hands of grief were wringing and wringing His wet cloth of face. They wrung out his tears. But his mouth betrayed you – it accepted the spoon in my disembodied hand that reached through from the life that had survived you. Day by day his sister grew paler with the wound she could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed it each day with her blue Breton jacket. By night I lay awake in my body the Hanged Man my neck-nerve uprooted and the tendon which fastened the base of my skull to my left shoulder torn from its shoulder-root and cramped into knots – I fancied the pain could be explained if I were hanging in the spirit from a hook under my neck-muscle. Dropped from life we three made a deep silence in our separate cots. We were comforted by wolves. Under that February moon and the moon of March the Zoo had come close. And in spite of the city wolves consoled us. Two or three times each night for minutes on end they sang. They had found where we lay. And the dingos, and the Brazilian-maned wolves – all lifted their voices together with the grey Northern pack. The wolves lifted us in their long voices. They wound us and enmeshed us in their wailing for you, their mourning for us, they wove us into their voices. We lay in your death, in the fallen snow, in the falling snow. As my body sank into the folk-tale where the wolves are singing in the forest for two babes, who have turned, in their sleep, into orphans beside the corpse of their mother. - from: ‘Birthday Letters’ (1998)
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 09:04:03 +0000
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