The Heron’s Nest, Volume XVIII, Number 2: June 2016
Category Archives: poems of grief
Compassion (a poem about depression)
Depression is not very pretty. Nor is it very kind. It has many faces, and it comes and goes as it pleases. It can affect almost anyone. If you are someone who has struggled with depression, you know it never goes away completely but hides, waiting for the right moment to reappear. It isn’t something to be lightly dismissed in yourself or in others who suffer from it. Who hasn’t seen the devastating effect it can have on a vulnerable person? I’ve struggled with it, and I’ve certainly known many others who were also affected by it.
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Watching someone you love battle depression is never easy. It isn’t easily “fixed,” even in this age of modern medicine. Therapy and medicines are there, and for some people they help so much, but for others, less so. Compassion, patience, unconditional love and presence are the lifelines we can offer…to someone else and to ourselves.
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To listen to me read this poem, please click on the link below. It will take a minute to begin.
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Compassion
Taking on your pain was something
I tried to do, like slipping on your
jacket, pushing an arm in and then
another, pulling it tight around myself,
hoping that by feeling what you do,
it would diminish your pain.
No matter how hard I tried, it wasn’t a fit.
Your depression fell around me in loose
folds, the sadness sagging around my heart.
Besides, it would leave you cold, open
to the fickle winds that blew your way.
Compassion was first published in Erasing the Doubt by Mary Kendall
(Finishing Line Press © 2015)
Gusts ~ Tanka #2
Gusts ~ Tanka #1
I’ve had the good fortune to have three of my tanka published in the latest issue of GUSTS,
NO. 23, Contemporary Tanka, Spring/Summer 2016 (Tanka Canada). This is the first time my work has appeared in this beautiful poetry journal, and I’m most grateful to the editor, Kozue Uzawa.
I’ve decided to post each tanka separately here on my blog.
Brushing Your Hair
Brushing Your Hair
In the last month you ask me a favor.
Will I brush your hair when you have passed?
You seem to want to greet whatever comes
looking your best. I give my promise.
Each day when I come home, I offer
to brush your hair, but you say no,
maintaining the independence
you have always shown.
Later, in hospice, I no longer ask.
I hold your hands, rubbing lotion in,
skin so fragile, like a butterfly wing.
It is time now to make the last ablutions.
I clean your face and brush your hair,
your sleeping eyes flicker
under paper-thin lids, pale blue veins
tracing their course across them.
I imagine your mother tenderly holding you,
stroking your cheek, watching you dream
in her arms—her newborn daughter
with milky breath.
Ninety-one years separate us, your two watchers.
One joyously bringing you into the world;
the other sitting silently in the dim-lit room,
keeping watch over you through the night.
The poem, “Brushing Your Hair” is from my chapbook, Erasing the Doubt (c) 2015, Finishing Line Press.
Transformation and the Ineluctable Signs of Ageing, prose poem by Mary Kendall (My Meta-Morphosis Series)
My thanks to Silver Birch Press for including my poem in this wonderful series. I have been enjoying reading all the poems posted, each so different from the others.
Transformation and the Ineluctable Signs of Ageing
by Mary Kendall
This is not my first transformation. No, it happened way back when—six decades and then some, and I find myself no longer who I thought I was just ten, twenty or even thirty years ago. Those were other lifetimes, times I lived through, times I felt so alive, enjoyed, loved, and times I remember, but those were lives I knew I had passed through completely.
I have the evidence.
Now, going further back in time—forty or fifty years ago, it all begins to change. It starts to slow down—slow—slow—slow—as if someone has put a finger out and touched the spinning world—and now it slows down enough as if I must to look for a place to rest.
This viewing backwards makes me dizzy—dizzy—dizzy enough to want to keep traveling back to the end, which in fact is the beginning, and…
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A Poet in Time 