Watching someone die is a fraudulent experience The deep significance is felt the meaning escapes like a child's first punishment. The dying ravish your strength whether by throttle of convulsive gasp or tideless fading away like ancient familiar sounds in sea shells the moment is the same reinforced brutality to life a rugged cliff bloodstained with the agonising rhythm of many heads. A cold demise; each successive moment a banishment. The terror is in leaving behind the ache is in departing.
Humming fantasies crowd their stings to seize and record the moment the hands curl in spasm to hold it back; this life, this infidel. It is too late. Everything and nothing has happened. A huge machine the earth, grinds to a bolt-knocking halt.
It is the changing of the tide at the boundary hour Life like a handful of feathers engulfed by cliff winds one like yourself swept Oh so swiftly into the anchorage of history Tears and sighs; sighs and tears stamping the leaden feet the solid agony of years they all abound. One life or a million contrived by nature or by man greatly obscures the issue.
Face to face with dying you are none-the-wiser Yet it seems a most ignoble epitaph ‘He was a man and had to die; after all.’
Lenrie Peters was born in Bathurst (Banjul), The Gambia, in 1932. He studied medicine at Trinity College Cambridge and later trained as a surgeon. He currently practises in The Gambia. He has been Chairman of the West African Examinations Council. He has published one novel, The Second Round, and four volumes of poetry – Poems (Mbari Press, 1964), Satellites (Heinemann, 1967), Katchikali (Heinemann, 1971) and Selected Poetry (Heinemann, 1981). He is the Officer of the Republic of the Gambia. This poem is taken from Satellites by kind permission of the author.
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