Your mother falls to her knees
three times in a week until an ambulance
delivers her to a brand new hospital
beside a ring-road on the city’s edge
while at home the crouching lemon tree
holds its breath until one more bitter pledge
bursts out yellow beneath leaves greased with green:
you have twenty minutes to decide on what this means.

You keep expecting to fall down too.
By the hospitals, car parks rake in a fortune
(your first half hour is free).
Bring your aches like children needing to be near you,
there’s no hurry now it’s known that soon
each ruthless day will leave us in the dark:
in twenty minutes, in pencil, in words that do it,
tell me what this means.

You have seen the elephant,
the devastation of each heartbeat gone unheard,
the swimming of it, bulky, floating
in this airy current:
put down your pencil now and do not turn from it.

Kevin Brophy’s new collection, Walking: New and Selected Poems, is also reviewed in the May issue.