Yesterday good friends, Rob, Linda and their daughter, Eleanor, visited my husband in hospital and cheered him up with stories and banter and useful information. They brought a card in the right spirit, and I have no doubt that made the queen lurking in my husband assert herself. It was a clever card with even cleverer inscriptions inside.
These included a poem, something I never expected from Rob, but a poem too with a deep but respectful knowledge of my husband, based on a running joke between us. For Geoff always likes to identify wild flowers on our walks together, although strangely he seems to come into his own with ‘wood anemones’, even to the degree that even people who love him most think he is prepared to assert that every flower he sees is a wood anemone.
Here’s the poem in a typed font:
The Wood Anemone
By Robert D. Goffee
a botanical pondering
Beneath the tree, it waits,
White against the dark bark.
it looks out upon the woods,
drifting in the wind, pondering.
"Who will find me and help,
for I do not know who I am.
or what has brought me here."
From out of the trees, a sound
purposeful, knowledgeable, confident.
It is the stride of a gazelle
in human form, nimble, graceful.
With expert understanding the figure
points towards the humble flower.
"That is a wood anemone," he states.
with a firm simplicity of deep understanding.
The Flower basks in this recognition.
I half suspect that there is a bat at me as a bad versifier at the drop of a hat in these sincere free lines, but that is the norm of my thought and not Rob’s, though he knows I might want him to count his syllables in each line and regularize the metre. LOL! What I do see is a sincere loving person expressing himself in a beautiful thought about my husband – that whatever his faux hubristic confidence in botany, his heart-led expertise is in recognising the pain of the vulnerable and marginalised, giving a proud name to what otherwise remains humble and loving it in that name.
That’s what my husband did for me after all.
Meanwhile he lies in a hospital bed and his doggy hangs her head in sorrow (as does doggy’s other Daddy)!.
With love
Steven xxxxxxxx
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