Into Denial

Into Denial

 

Denial

No, it’s not

It didn’t

Happen

You were here

Now

Denial 

you are not 

not denial

You were robust

Always strong

Our light

Joking

Denial

With you we were

Safe and then

Fading

Denial

You seemed

Distant

Denial

I’m not here now

And you’re not there

Not

There

Not…..

A memory left of you

But we remember

Always

Always, we remember.

 

Simon C.J. Falk     28 July 2020

 

=============================================

You might like to follow #WATWB

Advertisement

Dad’s Fishing Knife

Dad’s Fishing Knife

Even though we are often people who live in the ideas in our heads we can be very concrete. Specific people, places and objects ground us in particular relationships and memories.  A knife Dad used to keep in our fishing tackle box brought it all back to me. It was a symbol of times shared together, of his fishing before my time, and of what may happen in the future. 

 

Dad’s Fishing Knife

There it was

in the tackle box

in the boot.

Sheathed in timber,

an offcut of simple grain

that he had cut

just to the size of the blade –

Dad’s fishing knife.

It had lived other lives too:

cutting fine twine for plumblines

on garden edges,

or severing coarse and wispy jute,

to stake up veges and flowers

in the garden.

But

it was the fishing knife for some years.

It had cut lines,

beheaded fish,

and gutted them.

Pippis it had prised.

There it sits now,

out of the tackle box.

Tempered in a forge,

tarnished

by time and tides.

It was with us

when we first fished together

by the banks

of the Murrumbidgee River.

It had sat on the pub jetty

of Merimbula Lake,

while we had fought off crabs

so tailor schooling by

could bite on our lines.

The handle of that knife

holds memories to its hilt.

They are reminders of Dad

The

one I first dropped a line with.

And now,

here it is,

Dad’s fishing knife,

slicing through

the marrows of my memory.

It awaits

The next fish

With one fisherman down.

 

 

 

Simon C.J. Falk 8 February 2014