The Brutal Heart
Steve Bamlett
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; oh, honey-bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
W.B Yeats. The Stare’s Nest By My Window (full poem at link)
At first there was no pain:
A rosebud grew on love’s return
From a star on which it touched,
Alighted rather –tenderly such
As if this were the first step made
Along the years since that decade
Where first I felt my body thrill
And knew I wasn’t, this time, ill.
In the theatre I played my part
Watching tender shoots, whilst
As audience apart, in quite another way,
I watched again simultaneously.
The house lights fell, a spotlight scanned
Over the remnants of that plot
We tended over daily, panned
For gold-dust one more day.
But in that dark I fell asleep and
Morphine took you in its arms.
The pain was such, as if I had farmed
A no-man’s land. That spot light grew;
The theatre stayed dark
Till I thought a voice spoke out:
“Now, where to start:
In this bad case, I’d give my shout
To say, nowhere but by immediate excision of the heart”.
If I heard it, was I already dead?
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