All day today I have been working at the printshop
…and thinking about Helen
A rare and lovely bird.
When I last saw her, a week ago in the hospice, I had told her about finding a dead moorhen – ‘perfect, undamaged,’ I said. ‘Oh, so quite damaged on the inside!’ She replied.
She told me she had found a moorhen-chick as a child. Moses she had called it – and of her sadness when she had been unable to keep it alive.
An unfading memory of a time when another life had trembled in her hand.
Silver March sunshine and grey clouds alternating outside.
Inside, the consolation of work.
Drifting with Helen through my mind – words…
Inside, the consolation of work.
Drifting with Helen through my mind – words…
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.
Wendell Berry
Helen Bapty-Ireland
23rd October 1957 – 25th March 2014
May you have wings…
