Radioactive Heart

a poem about a heart

(picture taken from Sobotta Atlas of Human Anatomy, vol 2, 10th edition)

Radioactive Heart

That bitch
spitting bitter-as-coffee blood.

It’s a migration of birds not knowing
where to put down for rest.

It's built of sorrow heaped on the floor
like laundry, or mess she can’t tidy up.

A not-forgotten war when she was born,
an angry mother still shouting.

Is this my life now? she asks the oracle dark.

Death hides in her bedside drawer like medicine.
But every time she opens it, it disappears like
lemon ink. Ninja-death knows how to use shadows
and light. Death is a dappled wood
full of anemones and ivy.

She can still peel an egg,
is friends with the jelly.
It nestles in her stomach
like birds migrating.
Never knowing where to rest.

(first Published in Icarus)

I wrote this poem during lockdown when my mum was visiting and had problems with her ankles swelling (she had become so lonely and isolated during lockdown the moment there was  a window of opportunity we flew her over to us and she ended up staying for a year.) I took her for an angiogram and she was radioactive for sometime after we had to keep the children away from her. 

We were walking in the woods every day, some days I had to force my mum into it just like a child, she would sullenly resist and say ‘I hate walking’, but she also hated saying no - more than walking! some days my children had to force her into it as if they were already adulting - we wanted her to live longer so very much.

My mum died this April having suddenly developed a super fast growing tumour the previous December. With her belly as big as a whale her heart gave way and I held her through two heart attacks. Her eyes were never so piercingly blue and she was never more my mum as she wiped my tears away and told me she would be ok whilst I watched her vitals become increasingly erratic on makeshift gear from the ambulance, knowing full well she wouldn’t.

(my mum in the woods 2021, we laughed about how witchy she looked in this photo!)

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