You Have To Laugh Poem by Sue Oxley

I am caught up in abandonment,
As if it were the theme running like an empty road -
Death, disappointment, desertion, dislike they clatter along it, year by year,
But nothing is as awful as self-pity. Christ no, Jesus no,
God no, tell us a joke Sue, make us laugh Sue, sing a song then
We'll forget, you'll forget or we'll all pretend and laugh, as once
We laughed through starvation, disease, horror, war.

I watch the seashore and the tide that comes and covers that causeway
The bubbling green grey saltiness rolling and swelling, the tsunami sweeping and taking and making everything clean
Like love, like real, true love, like overwhelming love for a child, like love that is screaming need, like love that never ends
And I swim in its cold and lie in its warmth and swirl in its depths and it will never end, never end
Until it does. Until it seeps, achingly, quietly, slowly away
And I feel that it's going, but I think I am wrong, so lacking in trust
Until the final emptiness comes, dry and cold and dark green.
Seaweed covered lumps, shivering in slime,
All over the road and a beach alone and
Waiting and watching the thin grey line moving somewhere else
And the scream of the gull pecking for scraps scrapes out from my throat
rising in sound
And that which will never end has ended
In abandonment.
But sing us a song Sue, tell us a joke, such a laugh, such a laugh.
You have to laugh don't you?