No Flowers – Richard Tyler

This poem was written for #DyingMatters week 

 

There is a grief no one brings flowers for.

The grief of still being here,

in a body that no longer answers to its old name.

 

You were not taken.

You were translated into a language

your tongue is still learning to hold.

 

Consider the salmon.

She does not return as she left.

The ocean’s silver has burned from her skin.

Her jaw has hooked itself into a shape

that cannot eat.

Her body is becoming the river

that is becoming her ending.

 

She is not less salmon for this.

She is the salmon the journey required.

And when she lays herself down at last

in the gravel of her birthplace,

the forest will drink her through the roots

of trees she will never see.

 

This is not redemption.

This is participation

in something larger than recovery.

 

Consider the tree that survived the fire.

It does not pretend.

The black runs up its trunk like a held breath.

Inside, a ring records the year the rain refused.

Darker. Narrower. True.

 

It is not asked to be grateful.

It is not told it is stronger now.

It is simply a tree after fire,

still tree,

differently tree,

and the birds still come.

 

Consider the reef that bleached

and did not entirely die.

What grew back, grew back sparser in some places,

braver in others,

hosting strangers the old reef never knew.

 

It does not apologise

for being a record of what it survived.

 

I will tell you what I have learned

from those who do not speak:

 

That effortlessness is its own innocence,

and we do not know we are wearing it

until it is taken.

 

That the self who moved through mornings

without negotiation,

whose hands obeyed,

whose breath was a gift

she did not have to ask for,

she deserves to be mourned.

Light a candle.

Say her name.

She was real, and she was loved,

and she did not survive.

 

And that the one

who came back in her place

is not a lesser version.

She is a different organism.

She carries weight

the old self was not built for.

That weight is not a punishment.

It is the shape of having been somewhere

the old self could not go.

 

Let the small dyings matter also.

The selves who go before us.

The capacities that slip away

while we are still standing.

The morning we realised

we would not be returning to who we were.

 

These deserve their wake.

These deserve the long table,

the lit candle,

the spoken name.

 

And if you are the one

carrying the altered body,

the changed mind,

the life that no longer

fits the shape it was cut for,

 

know this:

 

The salmon does not grieve her silver.

She becomes the river.

The tree does not grieve its smoothness.

It becomes the place the owl nests.

The reef does not grieve its symmetry.

It becomes the stranger’s home.

 

You are not failing to recover.

You are recovering into someone else.

 

And she,

the one you are becoming,

the one whose weight you are learning to carry,

the one whose effort is now visible

where once it was hidden,

 

she is not less.

 

She is the one the journey required.

And the forest is already drinking

what you thought you had lost.