Fortnightly Poem 1.A (Featured)

My featured poem for the week is from Sarah Holland-Batt’s Stella Prize winning book The Jaguar* (How wonderful a poetry collection winning the Stella for the second year running!). There were so many wonderful poems in this book especially in the first and last sections- it was very hard to pick just one!

Terminal Lucidity Sarah Holland-Batt

After twenty years away, an intercession of clarity

in your final hours: surfacing from a morphine surge,

suddenly you were there again,

your eyes lighting on my face, gold-panned hazel,

alive with the old intelligence.

In the small hospital room at the corridor’s end

we listened to Clair de Lune

as vague rain prickled outside in the garden bed.

You listened, dozed, awoke. I spoke,

and you stayed until my words petered out,

then stayed through the silence after.

It’s all silence now—the profound silence

which makes all other silences loud—

yet in the caesurae of days, I hear you listening.

*The Jaguar  Sarah Holland-Batt (UQP  2022)