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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