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Old Woman

We see you every day
on the newsreels
anonymous
as if a human being
ever were anonymous
a face like the worn map of tragedy
your hands reaching out
to the TV camera
begging for water, food
or beseeching
in some unrecognisable, meaningless
local language, or
cursing an enemy not visible
who made a ruin of your home

or being carried unceremoniously
between urgent hands in some material
from a bed that is no longer there

or sitting bemused by life
awaiting some unnamed help beyond request
though seldom accompanied by your son
who found a greater cause
than home, or age; and somewhere else…

or, in the occasional poem —
tended, your paper skin and jutting hipbones
not unlike some starved chicken’s carcase
described with painful love
as if you only lived a living life
in the past tense,
beyond the verses, between the metaphors

and yet, if we could only find words
to describe what’s living still,
where pride hides, pride
too precious now in grief to speak,
how you love those who are not here,

and yet you’re there, alive or dead
patient, proud, silent, unnamed
in every newsreel, every child, every poem
that has ever been written

and I salute you

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