Last night out of nowhere I was back 6 years
to a time when I stood unsteady by my bed
as it and the room, the trees,
gravel roads and the farm withdrew before me
drawing me into another past to another bed
and room where I lay between sanitised sheets
in a hospital far away. And I was nowhere,
Between worlds, drifting on tides of pain that
Receded in batches through time and back again.
And I searched for tragic memories that were lost
in the grey battered corridors of my brain.
It wasn’t me in that bed, not the one
I wanted to see, the one who had once been
whole and undamaged. And in that knowing
I was lost and I cried at how much I had lost
and how much I knew that I didn’t want to know.
I lay there and together we returned.
the past and the present both lost.
I regret that lost time of my life. The times I
I had spent with my husband and daughter,
Now gone, lost, with only fragments of disconnected
moments remembered.
What were their thoughts then?
What did they feel?
Were there silent tears deep in the night?
I don’t know and I don’t know why it took me
back nor why so many memories were lost
and never given back except tonight when
it gave me a glimpse of that day when
I lay in that bed.
Now, tonight, I lay on a bed with no plastic mattress
or crisp white sheets for in my sleep I escape for a while
to drift on clouds floating free far from then and now.