High Care Facility.

This last weekend, I, along with Jo and Chloe (the dog) took the caravan to the far south coast for a couple of days. When I lived there to nurse my dying mother, as anyone who has done that will attest, depression was never far away. So I joined a writers group to get the feelings out. At the writers meeting on Saturday, I renewed contact with some old friends, read some of 'Cull' and sold a few copies. But in the back of my mind was this poem, probably the best I wrote while nursing Mum, after she was committed to an 'Aged high care facility'. She understood the need for the move, but to see her there day after day, waiting to die, was heart breaking and I still cannot read this poem aloud without tears.

She sits and she stares
at the door to her world
from which she came,
to this allotted space.

Beautiful mind,
cruelly spared.
Taunted though empty days
and long, long, grieving nights,
by mem’ry of lost relevance.

Craving assurance;
a human embrace,
while latex plastic hands
touch only from necessity.

This little time, a miser’s gift.
Last chance to ease her passing,
with what will not be given;
The final validation of her existence.

 Thanks Tess for your wonderful prompts . Book launch date set for 27th November but the way it is going, the print run might have been sold out by then! One reviewer said "A cross between David Suzuki and John Grisham". How about that! Now available through Amazon.