À la douce mémoire

There's always a train jolting into a distance,
the sound of summer rain on summer roofs,
a woman in an upstairs bedroom curled
upon a bed hunting breath. 

They came and went, came and went, 
throughout the week like the trains
she heard at night. Her sister bore the burden
of the woman curled upon the bed.

The district nurse came four times a day.
The home hospice team set up camp.
The woman curled upon the bed
the focus of employees across the town.

She knew her future the woman in the bed,
a matter of days, took the trouble to order
chocolates for a favoured in-law,
brought her nephew to tears with kind words.

Day by day they came and went, the carers
and the hospice team. All the while the sister
stayed stroking hair, holding hands,
talking of younger days and stuff that binds.

The curl of the woman in the bed began to slide
away from consciousness, the sister saying
it was safe to go, to join the daughter dead
seven years and all the loved ones.

And slowly faded the woman curled.
She clutched me close one afternoon
wanting nothing more than a stroking hand
and music to see her through.

So before the woman curled in the bed
let the drugs do their work 
her hands flew across the screens
of phones and iPads seeking Finzi

or McKeller or Aled Jones or Water Music
until the sister took the technology
from her hands and settled on Faure's
Requiem, and the little body lost in the bed,

hunting breath, hardly the breath to scrape
a cough, punished with back ache, 
IBS, bed sores, all but a skeleton, 
restless, hands plucking at her shoulder

curled into a small package for oblivion,
believing in angels and an afterlife of sorts.
(Her nephew said it could be wonderful 
to return as a tree or a swarm.) 

The little body barely spoke at all 
when an old friend called by. 
The hospice team returned again 
gave her morphine, eased her pain.

They gently rearranged the bed. 
The woman could lie quiet now
held in her sister’s valiant love.
She never awoke, was restless for

a while longer then, when no one
was looking, stopped hunting breath
changed colour and was gone.