SIBBS Newsletter, Autumn 2021

SIBBS Newsletter, Autumn 2021 | www.tcf.org.uk 11 No coming, no going No after, no before I hold you close to me I release you to be free Because I am in you And you are in me By Thich Nhat Hanh Here’s a poem I wrote the year after my brother Robin died. I had been working on a newspaper that day, editing a story about an artist who put a phone in a wood so people could ring it and hear bird song. I was overcome by wanting to tell Robin about it – it’s the kind of things he’d have loved. But there was no space to express that at work. At home I picked up my pen… and realised that this idea of the phone in the woods is a lot like my grief: as if Robin had gone away from the phone and I was still waiting for him to come back. The biggest thing I needed to tell him was that he had died. How could I be left alone with this knowledge, and not talk it through with him? But that is the nature of loss – world-changing, yet life goes on all around. A Selection of poems A Beginning… One day you wake up and realise you must have survived because you are still here, alive and breathing. But you don’t remember the infinitely small steps and decisions you took to get there. Your only awareness is that you have shed miles of tears on what seems to be an endless road of sorrow. One day, one glorious day, you wake up and feel your skin tingle again. And you forgot, just for an instant, that your heart is broken… And it is a beginning. By Susan Borrowman Robin When you died I pinned a phone in the woods and rang it when I missed you. No one came but the trill in the woods told Earth you were gone. I listened and heard a nesting bird’s thin ticklish whistle, a breeze buffed the handset and shivered the trees, then nothing. Earth pushed on up, I heard her children gathering time. By Rachael Claye