Nocturne by Louise Glück (Lavinia)

Nocturne

BY LOUISE GLÜCK

Mother died last night,

Mother who never dies.

Winter was in the air,

many months away

but in the air nevertheless.

It was the tenth of May.

Hyacinth and apple blossom

bloomed in the back garden.

We could hear

Maria singing songs from Czechoslovakia —

How alone I am —

songs of that kind.

How alone I am,

no mother, no father —

my brain seems so empty without them.

Aromas drifted out of the earth;

the dishes were in the sink,

rinsed but not stacked.

Under the full moon

Maria was folding the washing;

the stiff  sheets became

dry white rectangles of  moonlight.

How alone I am, but in music

my desolation is my rejoicing.

It was the tenth of May

as it had been the ninth, the eighth.

Mother slept in her bed,

her arms outstretched, her head

balanced between them.

Level: Upper Sec

Themes: Death, Family, Grief, Sorrow, Alienation, Escapism, Denial

Stylistic features: Free verse

Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney (Lavinia)

Mid-Term Break

BY SEAMUS HEANEY

I sat all morning in the college sick bay

Counting bells knelling classes to a close.

At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying—

He had always taken funerals in his stride—

And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram

When I came in, and I was embarrassed

By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.

Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,

Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.

At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived

With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops

And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him

For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,

He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.

No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

Level: Upper Sec

Themes: Living, Death, Loss, Sorrow & Grieving, Relationships, Family & Ancestors

Stylistic Features: Lyric poem, Tercet

Bear by boey kim cheng

Bear  by boey kim cheng

My daughter's teddy bear,
smuggled into our bed when she stole
into our sleep in the hour
when she is all on her own
fending off the wild things.
What a snug fit, the two between
my wife and me. How a child's sleeping face
marries all in its peace.

I remember my childhood bear;
it was a coarser fur, browner, but like hers
and most other bears, China-made.
My father won it shooting bottles
at a booth in Great or Happy World,
those fairs of dizzy rides and shows
that lasted the whole of your childhood
and have exited into the country's past.
I sat it, walked it, bedded and hugged
it like a raft in the stormy winds
of my parent's quarrels. When
my father left, Bear held faint promise
that he would come back,
and be sensible like Bear.

Year by year, Bear and I waited; the stitches
came undone, the fur shedding
to reveal fibre padding, Bear rubbed
bare to its bones, the limbs that wound
round and round dislocated. Soon
the brown glass eyes were hanging
by a tenuous thread, then gone.
Still I kept him by my side
hoping that things would be
once again whole.

My mother threw him out
in one of those removals,
lost with my father in
the endless migrations of childhood.
It waits now in a heaven
of dislocated things
like my father.