Newsletter for Childless Parents, Spring 2021

Newsletter for Childless Parents | www.tcf.org.uk 6 A selection of poems from Gill Hartley... I felt I had to share this poem with you. I think of you all the time. The rainbows we keep seeing on windows in support of the NHS and support workers. It makes me realise how we all long for physical contact with our children and how heartbreaking it is for those who cannot be with their loved ones when they are in hospital or isolation. Or be with them when they die...It reminded me of this poem I wrote for my first book, My True Son . I hope you will identify with this poem from my book, My True Son , written in the months following my son Will’s death. I think maybe we all need some hope now after the past year and that there is some light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Like me, the garden is desolate, the mantle of winter has cast us both down. Seed heads have replaced the flowers, the rose arch is a bower of thorns. The hammock where we swung on sunlit evenings, stands dormant in the dank, anaemic air. Everything looks so abandoned, bleak and starved of light. The garden, like me, is bereaved, now summer has turned into night. This morning, I searched the sleeping garden, trod the sodden, yellowed grass, knelt amongst the hibernating bushes, cast aside the crumbling leaves, and then I found a thrusting shoot of crocus. Hope