Poetry

On Selling Up the Family Home

Today the heart is a bleak cylinder

for my mother who has stopped wishing for

the embroidered cloths of heaven, and I

have followed suit. Already

we’ve dismantled my father’s chattels,

five years’ dead, already we’re reduced,

yet the walls speak voluminously.

Distant rage, love, disappointment,

and our library, scattered to the back rooms

of reluctant charity shops, and the photographs

whittled down to the core - faces mostly -

mostly laughing, capable and strong.

Caroline Butler

© 2014