Before She Left Poem by Pamela Ascroft

Before She Left

In the chalk-filled chock full garden, Arietty sits musing with her tea and paintbrush.
Those are primroses, she says.
Full of promise, full of color and history.
Like you, I say.
Stuff and nonsense.
She wrinkles the already paper thin skin on her alabaster face in disdain.
The painting is weak, like this tea.
Like my resolve, she says with the weight of worlds in her words.

Bluejay scraps and sparrow days crowd her mind and flit out of reach in the corners of memory.
We sit in silence punctuated with the deafening screams of the unconscious and roll the corseted mysteries of the past between our fingers.

Like rain, she says.
Like solid rain and dirty fog.

What is? I ask.
This life, Arietty whispers.
Our existence.
And so it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world that will end without amen.

The disease runs the relay race, baton in hand.
Arietty does not want the baton but cancer makes her take it.
Cold steel in her veined hand.


Requiem, Arietty.