Unweepability

This is such a piercing poem of alone-liness. Makes you count your blessings

THE COCOA-MUG
The way that between your fingers the soap shoots
In the bath, so her Spode cocoa-mug went
Arcing across the kitchen, landing in
The stone sink with a crash like armament

So she stands staring down at a thousand pieces
Of what she had been drinking from for years
After her mother died, whose it had been.
Apparently it’s an occasion for tears

For shocked she finds that hot stuff freely pouring
In weirs over her flushing cheeks: it is
All out of proportion, she knows this even
As it is happening: no excuse for this

While the desert creeps & the needed tears of the sky
Don’t fall at all & the babies die: no reason
For such precipitation over a mere
Mug, onset of such a rainy season.

But then she sees that the true cause she is weeping
Is simply this: that she’s nothing to cry about,
No one she loves who can die, no one she loves
Who can shout at her in the bedroom & storm out,

And that is why she stands there blinded & shaking
A big grown woman of nearly forty-five
Pouring out her hearts-blood over chippings, mourning
The stark unweepability of her life

Hilary Corke

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