This Day

by Mike Greenacre

‘Death will not be denied…’ Helen Garner

‘Death will not be denied’…
‘to try… makes a mockery of love’…
“I want to go home,” she
cried, laying in her hospital bed
and I explained she’d have to
get better first, still believing
this was a temporary stage

and yet in the next sentence
her heart had changed direction:
“I want to die” came as her final
call as I looked across to my
mother’s earnest gaze and the
family that now surrounded her

but there was no escape, no Yellow Alert
like in the Post Office in London
during the War, where those in the
Voluntary Fire Service would fasten gas
masks, don helmets and put on rubber
boots as if aliens commanding their stations

with her’s on the top floor “I’d rather see
what was coming,” she explained
with fire hoses dousing flames as
messerschmitts sneak as snipers through
the night air, bombers dropping doodlebugs
with their foreboding drone, until it
cuts out and silence shields their way.

Though never hit, here there were
no ‘near-miss’ stories to cheer us
or her fourteen grandchildren on this day.