Aberdeen University professor Tom Rist shares this intimate and poignant collection of three poems exploring living with cancer.
i. Ward
Here with the terminally bald
I think of old Sarum
where after a ceremony
lepers were told they were dead
and sent on their way. Apparently
dead men were everywhere then,
passing you on the street
in their other world,
talking excitedly maybe
in gaggles and groups
of whatever gossip or news
excites the dead.
So in the waiting room
leafing through gossip
from Hello! or OK
listen to the chatter:
we have our lives, we dead,
our greetings and questions
and some of us are morose
and some are cheerful.
ii. On The Bikini Atoll
They are complaining now
those old men
with cancers, deformities
saying they should have had masks
or suits or boots
or that they shouldn’t have been there at all
and then you see
these soldiers, line upon line,
looking to sea
where the bomb will destroy
atoms and dust and even
order, reason in nature,
so that their uniform
turn of command,
their military symmetry
giving their backs to the sea
like a wilful blindness
looks like nostalgia.
Not that I’m not
sympathetic or wouldn’t
uphold the old men,
not that I don’t think
everything they can be given
they should be given
or that their cries
shouldn’t be heard
as if by nurses,
no. Who give all
deserve all, like these men,
though few give as much
and who wouldn’t turn away
at the sentence of death
when a word like cancer
explodes with a noise you can’t hear?
iii. Precipice
If I am grave today,
if I am solemn
I will add one body’s weight
to this precipice I
like light must step over.
So this step, like a pavement,
a bridge through air
will become an edge
of the earth of many
and among the jagged
hills and valleys,
serrated horizons
of high-rise and low
among the pebbles
like boulders
and the sands
like storms
I will make a step
that’s a place to fall into.
So I will put on my happiest
clothes and eyes,
prepare my teeth
for smiling not biting,
I will turn off the television
where the visions are
of the holes and the bodies
in the earth that is falling
away
and I will perform
the trick of flying
that for some is called walking
and others call living
and though the earth is falling away
in shallow graves
less deep than my sorrow
and though the bodies with the special
mute appeal of the dead
are raising their arms
and smiling and bidding me welcome
I will step over them
and not look down,
and so I will tell the bodies
their time is not yet
since I have a step to take and more beyond that
steps that are forward and on
in the land of the living.
If I am grave today,
if I am solemn
I will add one body’s weight
to this precipice I
like light must step over.
So this step, like a pavement,
a bridge through air
will become an edge
of the earth of many
and among the jagged
hills and valleys,
serrated horizons
of high-rise and low
among the pebbles
like boulders
and the sands
like storms
I will make a step
that’s a place to fall into.
So I will put on my happiest
clothes and eyes,
prepare my teeth
for smiling not biting,
I will turn off the television
where the visions are
of the holes and the bodies
in the earth that is falling
away
and I will perform
the trick of flying
that for some is called walking
and others call living
and though the earth is falling away
in shallow graves
less deep than my sorrow
and though the bodies with the special
mute appeal of the dead
are raising their arms
and smiling and bidding me welcome
I will step over them
and not look down,
and so I will tell the bodies
their time is not yet
since I have a step to take and more
beyond that
steps that are forward and on
in the land of the living.
