0252 To My Elder Brothers Poem by Michael Shepherd

I think of you more often nowadays, I don’t know why;
how is it now with you?
And are you still somewhere – if you ever were -
that I might talk to you?

Will I one day meet you, talk with you,
and know just how it was?
Or do you, I wonder, ever think of me?
And if you do, do you regret
the fun we never had, the games we never played?

How different, I really wonder, would I be now,
if you were here - well, you’d be getting on now,
but there would be so much to look back on…
(and would our funerals maintain the order of our birth?)

What was it like? Did you have some choice,
that made you turn back when so nearly born?
You know that you were loved, with all the love
that Mum and Dad had poured into their wedding vows,
not so very long before; all the love
poured into each other and their lives…
was there some choice?

Did you hear something
within that cosy cave of flesh – Dad’s angry voice, perhaps,
knowing that this was one event
he wasn’t able to control? So that you turned back
halfway along the scary dark tunnel of love? That’s not a thought
I care to have. But I fought Dad, and just about survived..
and loved him, too, when I was very young…

And Mum – do you, I wonder, think – or know - what it must have been
for her? The biggest tiny present
that she could have given to Dad
taken from them, twice?
Did you know, you second one,
that the first had turned back too?

And so, as some wry joke, I say, when people ask
as people do - meaning always something that’s unsaid -
‘Are you an only child? ’ – I say,
all aggressive-defensive-like,
‘I’m the youngest of three miscarriages…’
and remember – that I never knew you
but I miss you so.