Thursday 25 June 2009

Getting Gold

When you visit an old One in the Care Home

it’s not much fun;

not so beautiful to clap eyes on frames

and hunchbacks;

the lady with a dress riding too high

boo-hooing

and Aunt’s intensity ‘You don’t know what it’s like for me.

No one does.’

 

But up there on the incessant flat screen,

bright as a galaxy, the Beijing Olympics,

team GB, greatest achievement,

UK athletes (all that gold)

with medals, anthems, shining faces,

thighs and torso, smoothly dolphin,

all the family proud as Punch

and the nation pleased as Punch

 

so I turn,

sever Auntie’s gaze,

when only two dimensions

grab me more than starving eyes

 

and it makes her cry;

that I look away.


8 comments:

  1. gave me a little shiver, uah.

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  2. Great depictation. Too great. Reminds me of those awful days spent with my father in a nursing home.

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  3. My grandmother had Alzheimers and was in a special home. We would visit weekly. You just took me there - again.

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  4. speachless, but love the poems and love my elders!

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  5. Great Poem,we shouldn't fear ageing.We should respect it and not worship false Gold.

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  6. Thought provoking. I recently did an hour of poetry reading to residents at a care home for elderly people in varying stages of dementia. So rewarding to see the engagement of so many. Memories of schooldays were awakened and one lady kept repeating "oh I did enjoy that!". I have been invited back in the new year. Please visit the sick and lonely. All they want is a little time.

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