Lynda Tavakoli is a professional member of The Irish Writers Centre whose work has been widely published throughout Ireland, the Middle East and the US. She has facilitated adult creative writing classes and the Seamus Heaney Award for schools, and has been nominated for Best of the Net Awards and the Pushcart Prize (2024). The effect of dementia within families is a subject that Lynda often returns to in her poetry and are included in both her debut collection ‘The Boiling Point for Jam’ and her second collection ‘A Unison of Breaths’ recently published by Arlen House.
A Village Practice
I find him attractive in that young and self-assured
dentist kind of way and I imagine, in my earlier life,
there could have been a spark of something there.
My mother waits in his chair, her brittle mouth only small.
I am told to sit in the corner and I do, examining
the cleanliness of the room, pondering how it cloys
in the disinfectant spaces between us.
He prises apart her poor jaw, chooses a drill.
The stickered soles of my mother’s shoes twitch
with some invisible electric shock
but the rest of her is numb, except her mouth,
which is not. I am her voice and the palliative
care of her crumbling teeth, yet I am reticent.
It does not do to question authority, regardless of age.
And pain relief, I ask. The request an unforeseen
tsunami across the room, a sudden game of Truth or Dare.
She doesn’t need it. She does. She doesn’t.
I cannot see my mother’s eyes but imagine them sealed,
blanking out the embarrassment of my irreverence
in this community where people talk. She does.
And his slender fingers finally find a syringe.
In the waiting room muted exchanges churn
around the lateness of the milking, or how
the silage has seen two cuts already the year.
We shuffle home, wordless. I want her to be proud of me
for standing up for her but worry that I went too far.
So she makes the tea, her bent shoulders stiff
in concentration. Good girl, she says. Good girl.
Gone
Even now your warmth tortures me
though you decided for yourself
to leave without us being there.
And me, wishing you back,
able only to stare
at the hollow of your throat
to a pulse extinguished
suddenly to stillness.
For in the end we are simply left
with sadnesses,
their shadows shocking
as they cross the sun
while in between remains
the light that says life carries on,
only because it does.
Pouffe
After she died and we were clearing her things,
I kept the better looking, shop-bought one.
A pouffe with the pizzazz of ooh la la,
and home for weary feet to fantasise
a can-can on The Avenue des Champs-Élysées.
I gave the other one away.
She had made that one herself.
Six National Dried Milk tins
saved from the war, covered
and re-covered after the burden
of my father’s bog-trodden,
hard-soled, Fermanagh feet.
And that final restoration
created from a benefactor’s cast-offs:
a coat, as hirsute as any camel,
with buttons big as biscuits
that we bought together from
some charity sale in Fivemiletown.
Sometimes it’s just too late,
our hearts forever squeezed
by the sharpness of memories
of what we gave away in haste.
Those small, important things, laid bare
with the aeonian cruelty of hindsight.
Requiem for the Unbeliever
I lost my faith one dog-damp afternoon
in our mother’s sitting room,
where her two-bar electric fire
sizzled heat in the unfamiliar space of her leaving.
On the sofa sat a man of religion taking notes,
scratching empathy onto the blank pages
of our mother’s life, his sacred scribblings
setting out an order of service for her funeral.
Psalm twenty-three; a reading from Corinthians 13;
two favoured hymns; his own address
about a life well-lived and dutiful to God.
But the poem she had loved so much, denied.
She had found it in a book she’d read,
when words had moulded shapes,
like breath, around the contours of her mouth,
their meanings sentient as any holy water tears.
Listen to my footfall in your heart, it said,
I am not gone but merely walk within you –
a message redolent of all those Sunday sermons,
steeped in Christian kindliness and understanding.
Yet in that sitting room, it would not do
to set a precedent, for even the departed faithful
had to learn to play by the rules. And so, I acquiesced
and left the room, my apostasy finally complete.
The Galway Review 