DEBBIE ROBSON

Two Deaths

Ariel was born at Court Green, three acres

wych elm and blackberries. Her mother moon

silvery in the sky, her father yew tree black

against the stars and a bonfire blazing as Sylvia

burns paper after paper on the red flames.

Curling up in the smoke her divided self.

She will fight and claw her way to be a poet

and everyone her subject and everything

dripping blood, red filaments and white hospital

rooms and the soul amputated and the moon,

shining down on her. She keeps looking, not out

at the world, but within. And seizes the chance

to live where Yeats had worked at Fitzroy Road,

inside white and cold, her final home.

While more than forty years before Virginia

finds her celebrated pen lost in the dust of

Talland House, St Ives near whitewashed houses

with thick walls, a windy fishing town. Haunted

by ghosts she sets sail on a voyage of discovery

to find the fin in the waters far out to sea.

To stop and feel the waves pounding on

the shore beating the measure of her days

to the end and always the lighthouse beam,

turning, illuminating moments of being.

Owling, prowling in the city she finds the

England of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens

bombed out. All the completeness ravished

and her life streaming away down unlighted

avenues to speak with the dead again.

She passed like a cloud on the waters sinking

into the Ouse weighted with stones, slipping away

down the river to others. No longer will Leonard

need to turn the key to keep the world out and

her writing in. Let the river subside and deliver her.

All is well now as the gas dissipates when others

fling open the door and find how carefully

Sylvia organised her suicide - cracks taped, doors

and windows stuffed with towels, her head

resting on a small, folded cloth, on the oven floor

bowed, kneeling at altar. Leaving a world she had

left many poems ago. Out of the ash will she rise

with red hair? Both gone. Two deaths for us to mourn.

Debbie Robson has published a chapbook with Boats Against the Current, a novella with Alien Buddha Press and previously Crossing Paths: the BookCrossing Novel and Tomaree a WWII love story. Her poems, micro, flash and short stories have been published internationally and online. She is on X and Instagram @lakelady2282.

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