The night season comes

and Earth is mine to hold,

witness its mark

and its gathering decay

while you sleep in an unconscious

darkening – skin around your mouth

turning blue, and inside that open circle,

inner lips peeling rice-paper fine

and your tongue like a dried log, that I keep sponging,

trying to saturate and regain its malleable form.

Your eyebrows twitch in what the nurses

promise me is not pain, promised me

you are comfortable

even though

for three days and three nights you

have lingered in a grizzly dehydrated shadow-stasis.

These days are like years, ripping away my trust,

my faith, my understanding of mercy,

solidifying the power

of bone-chiselling dread.

I love you, more in your helplessness,

in your patience for the final command, lingering,

red sores forming under your eyes,

fingers cold, purple pale and never grasping.

I stay with you in that place, even when

I sleep, I never sleep without you with me.

I love you and I hurt for you

and I want your release from this

brutal collapse of your form.

Why or even how you are lingering so long,

even the doctor can’t say.

I think you are buffering us from the pain of your loss

I think sometimes maybe mercy burns

hotter than punishment.

And these times

life surpasses understanding,

when the bottom current over quicksand thins,

breaking the chrysalis, clearing the way

for an unwanted redemption.

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Copyright © 2024 by Allison Grayhurst

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You can listen to the poem by clicking below:

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Read whole poem:

https://allisongrayhurst.com/my-mothers-sky/

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Outer nerves,

the madness of rise and decline,

undulating like an erratic wave,

the body joined to the illusion,

to past conclusions

and repetitive patterns remolded but unchanged.

Anxiety and intuition smudged

into one dim light.

I bow to the blowing wind, to the ignorance of now.

I hold her hand more now than I did as a child.

Tears rest for a while but lack any regulation.

Slow as a sloth but unpredictable as a storm.

Each day expends

what once was a normal week of energy.

Downward is the secret.

Bend in the direction of whatever gives.

The night is full of apocalyptic dreams,

solar flares and precautions, preparations

to minimize the coming death-blast charring burn.

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Copyright © 2024 by Allison Grayhurst

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.

You can listen to the poem by clicking below:

.

Read whole poem:

https://allisongrayhurst.com/my-mothers-sky/

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Last days

Dark days

dangerous death

at my doorstep,

swinging its hips to-and-fro.

Burning body, cracked, gnawed

away by insect bites, rodent bites

and the big blackhole open-mouth, forsaken.

Take what you must, but take it now,

swiftly, cover the core and the extremities

with your weight and then lift that weight

into the light of the sun, glorious

as a sparkle-water-wave-ripple

and a solitary hawk merging with the horizon.

Let her go like that hawk, pure in spirit

as she is, kind and soft as a child as she is.

Let her go into a dream that turns from

a dream into heaven’s threshold,

where she crosses over filled with your glory,

and my father looking on

with steady, welcoming eyes.

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Copyright © 2024 by Allison Grayhurst

.

.

You can listen to the poem by clicking below:

.

Read whole poem:

https://allisongrayhurst.com/my-mothers-sky/

.