Clem Henricson FRSA is a writer and philosopher and has directed a policy institute advising international government. Widely published, her most recent works include Morality and Public Policy and Making Space for Melancholy. Recently published poetry includes Beached Hull, North Sea Funeral, The Ship at Night, Retire to the sea….and howl, the Bayeux Tapestry, My Child, Vitreous Detachment, Dry, Bird Crash, Salt with liquid yolk, Corporeal Bits and In Eyeshot.

A visit from my aging aunt

From blue shell
to silhouette
in grey

Sitting like a dog
in the dark
watching

for two hours

without the itch to move

“Are you well?” I ask aghast

sculpted round
flesh folds
into cushions

in a hut
in the holiday woods

smells and shades

I sat my future on her lap
twenty years on

Would I be

squeezed
wrung
vacant

shutting down the cacophony of
sound from a radio blast

words dropping
like autumn leaves

in their place
shapes

would colours run a race
across my face

eyes swim
in their water

touching up with a tip of
memory brush

the scene
snap art

“Why don’t I move?”

I ask

Metronome

The funeral of my Swedish aunt –

– a long shunt across
the North sea
where I was shipped
from birth to fifty
water rocked and slapped
once a year every year
waves clocking
a settlement of nerves

but this was out of zinc
a mid-term homage
to passing

a ceremonial aria

four pilgrims in all
the rest dead or frail
three nieces one nephew
in a front pew
of sweet smelling pine

a young man in robes
took the floor
ignorant of who
he was putting to rest
but briefed he laid claim
to her core

– hair dresser and cook –

“How many heads of hair
has she cut?”
“How many dinners cooked?”

his eulogy was music
so many bits
on repeat

and all around the chapel
the pine forest floods
with reproductive might

streams from saplings
gasp in the shadow
of giants

the old are propped
too jammed to fall

so many hairs
on a scalp of earth.