Travelling through the dark,
a sudden peal of light
dressing the east in red and gold
and, just as sudden, the hills
bright with her hair.

Unbending, in the sense
that she was arthritic
in both hands and hips.
And upright, in the sense
that she kept her secrets in the eye
between blasts of truth-telling,
leaving her free to work while others slept.
Yet resigned, in the end,
to a projection of life
on the television screen:
steeping slowly for silent hours
in memories incessant
as the drizzling rain.
I loved her from the day she died.

She was a sermon to an empty church.
She was an impromptu bunch of chrysanthemums.
She was an end to an unfair fight.
She was a mother burying a child.
She was a glass of sherry to the new year.
She was an old bible, full of voided words.

In that retreat you doled out half
your life, beyond the noise
that engulfed the world, you cultivated
silence wild as the nest of your hair.
Edith, terminal daughter, reticent

as a bird, you perched in a chair
that time we came to see you
at the sanitarium, my Grandmother
chirpy with reminiscence about the girl
who kept her at home,

starting a line now come to rest in me.
A biscuit-tin from our last visit
keeps up-ending on the floor beside me, turning out
a voice crying words that stung:
"you must force the spoon or she'll swallow her tongue."