The week Mum died, I cycled through the countryside
On a still August day
It was warm, the villages were deserted but for
Shrieking kids in a primary school playground
And a lone railwayman lazing by his level-crossing
Waiting for a late-running train

Miles of empty fields stretched from a disused embankment
Beneath a vast pale sky
Time crystallised to the eternal afternoon
Of a childhood summer

But the world had never seemed so wide
Or time so short—this day, or a whole life,
Just a flash in dark infinity

It's as if I spend my energy within
This thin skin of brown and green
Sandwiched between one blue and another
Oddly lit by moments of near-illumination
By a stumbling god blundering round
The attic rooms with a torch

But zoom out: to the warm merciful dark
Reverberating still through un-numbered years
With all those voices that quarrelled and communed
That laughed and sobbed
And that—in one tender instant—
Made me

Then zoom in: draw close to the clash
And clamour of life as it fades within
This teardrop—
This splinter of that moment when
My mother turned and reached for her life
To find it was already over—
This teardrop, now so icy cold and still

Now listen:
Beneath the emotional froth of a struggling heart
Within the faintest whisper of a last thought
Beyond the faintest smudge of night sky
Hear: that sound that is not a sound
Echo of no voice and yet
Ghost of the first word that spoke all this
Into motion, that gave
Me life and then left
Me bereft

And here I am, orphan on a bike
In an English nowhere
All around, this year is on a cusp
As growth turns to harvest
Corn is cut and fields are stacked with bales

But death is so impermanent—
The newly ploughed fields will soon burst
With winter wheat and, already,
My mother's last breath fills the mouths
Of strangers, everywhere, all over this country