Museworthy: The Game

The Game

I must tell you of my felony.

It is, that at every moment, I was falling away

from beauty.

In a woman's face I was the eternal coldness,

in her hands the unmaturing child

growing heavier, disturbing her spine

year after year.

I broke my mother.

Going towards what I would not help

the ground unbloomed around me.

One without pain became known

as pain in my fingers, my toes, the wing

of my back.

Time had its own worthiness in which I did not

wait with grace.

I sat in it with death and wrapped life's shreds

like flesh around my hands and from there,

my body.

My invisible body!

There was someone, I remember, who saw it,

who said, dressed as a physician would dress,

“Harvest the falling”.

I replied to that voice with the knowledge

of my wisdom, disclaiming it,

and then was grasped as if a ball caught

at the height of an unknown game.

BY MTC CRONIN

MTC Cronin has had seven books of poetry published, the most recent
being Bestseller (Vagabond Press, 2001) and My Lover's Back —
79 Love poems (UQP, 2002). After being employed for most of the 1990s
in law, she has in recent years begun teaching literature and creative
writing at secondary schools and universities. She is currently working
on a PhD, Poetry and Law: Discourses of the Social Heart. Her books
are available by contacting her at <margie_cronin@hotmail.com>
or phone (02) 9550 2918.

From Green Left Weekly, July 3, 2002.

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From GLW issue 498