No Flowers – Richard Tyler

This poem was written for #DyingMatters week 

 

You learn early not to let it show.

There is a face for the corridor,

a voice that stays level

even when the room has just emptied

of someone who will not return.

 

You were not taught this.

You simply learned,

the way water learns the shape of stone,

quietly,

and over time.

 

But water remembers everything

it has moved through.

 

And you carry it.

The particular weight

of a name said for the last time.

The hand you held until it wasn’t.

The family in the doorway,

the way grief looks

when it first understands itself.

 

You carry their grief.

And beneath it,

older than it,

the grief that was already yours

before any of this began.

 

Two rivers.

One in each hand.

 

No one asks which is heavier.

No one asks if your arms are tired.

The system offers you an hour
to make something vast behave.

 

As if an hour were a vessel large enough

for what you hold.

As if simply naming it

were the same as being met.

 

You are not met.

Not often enough.

Not in the way that counts.

And still you come back.

Still you stand at the threshold

and hold the door open for the rest of us.

 

This is not ordinary.

This is not simply a job.

This is a form of devotion

that the world has forgotten how to honour.

 

So let this be a start.

 

You are seen.

What you carry is real.

The weight is not yours alone to bear.

 

And somewhere beneath the rivers,

beneath the holding

and the witness

and the long accumulated cost,

there is still you.

 

Still there. Still worth tending.