Brigitte

A poem to honour the dead

Photo by Ilie Barna on Unsplash

In the caverns of memory

not far from the smiles and exuberance

of dancing youth, an image of you

smiles in grayscale hues, fresh faced

and hair curled—captive to a history 

which fears above all else

to make itself known.

When you were gone, your memory

became our pain. We didn’t know 

what you were, so we bleached your clothes

and stitched in labels which caricatured

your humanity as disease—an attempt to conceal

those thorns amongst the rose bushes.

Your truth was put in a secret place,

and to speak your name was to summon

black magic of such force that in seconds

a tidal wave would wash our shipwrecked family

upon the desert beaches where you died, 

and we would become parched—searching

in the seduction of nouns, for some explanation

as to how we had arrived. But of course,

the fault was never ours.

Therefore, your name was locked away.

Your absence was marked by a space at the table

and the pauses in speech as we caught ourselves

rearranging sentences, to avoid the reality

that you were not the broken one—that perhaps,

the cracks appeared beneath the weight of a world

twice shouldered through the silence it imposed on you. 

Woven into the fabric of our own ignorance,

this wound is covered with the threads of shadows 

which hide any semblance of understanding towards

what it meant to be you. And so I learned 

not to speak of fragmentation—made to hide 

what it means to be many.

But I can see you in my garden—

I recognise the posture of a fallen angel,

eyes damp beneath the violence of a mask.

I see you kneeling as though in prayer, collecting

the ailing black petals of Blake’s rose

as the storm blows them across the desert earth. 

I can hear the worm scratching in your ear,

and I can feel the throbbing in your chest

as you search for someone 

who might give credence 

to your madness.

How cruel we have been with our silence.

At this junction in the forest of truth, we have become

blind to what binds us. The soul burns in recognition

that you were failed by our prejudices, and now

the same violence which clawed at your skin

emerges from the depths in which it was forced to live.

The further we run, the sooner our reckoning comes—

rising from the ashes of an overbearing sun, as 

autumn itself causes our leaves to fall on cold earth, 

leaving us grasping at the beauty which could have been, 

had we been able to see ourselves 

as a part of you.

It is too late to save you, but I may yet set you free.

Against the pressures of a culture, and a family

who do not want to recognise that they have tried

to possess your suffering—

I beckon with open arms, 

and speak your name:

Brigitte.

Your memory is a mirror,

and your image seen on the glass

releases the hurt that I have held,

which I now return to you—as yours;

that you may pass it onwards through the ages,  

until it finds its source. Through the silence in which 

it was forced to live, we waded through the quiet

as though in mud. I too felt the angel fall, saw 

the ground turn to desert, and knew that the rivers

ran with blood. But together, we can learn

to liberate this pain—the uprooted rose  

can be replanted, and one day 

it may well bloom again.