One Last Dance
Freya Sacksen (Anglia Ruskin University)
It all comes to telling stories now, doesn’t it?
Don’t say my mother died in silence,
Drowned in a silver spring day while none of us noticed,
Chained for five years to a wheelchair and aphasia and tears.
Say she died as a Celtic warrior queen,
Her hair fanning out behind her on a chariot drawn by lions,
Shot with an arrow through the throat, the blood streaming down her torc.
Don’t say my father died in the middle of the night,
Pinned under a stroke and years of drug abuse and cancers in every part of his body,
Killed by heartbreak and misery and loneliness that we couldn’t ease.
Call him Romeo, foolishly poisoning himself,
Prostrate with love, perishing for it,
Dying with a kiss, caught in a moment of romance forever.
It’s those of us, left behind, who tell the stories: how people come together,
How they fall apart.
Victors tell the stories; so too do the defeated and the grieving.
We etch their stories in our hearts and on their plaques.
Say then, that one day my father got a bouquet of tiger lilies, and a new bottle of Chanel no. 5
(my mother’s favorite)
And my mother put on her best white muslin dress with rainbows on her feet.
She wore a pounamu pendant, he wore a bloodstone signet ring.
The two danced off onto the moonlit harbor bays and simply didn’t come back in time for dinner.
Lay out two places for them at each occasion,
Hoping their dancing feet will lead them home.
Because we get to choose the stories we tell.
Freya Sacksen is a UK-based poet from Aotearoa New Zealand. Their work has been published in digital journal #EnbyLife, and they have a forthcoming pamphlet from DIRT imprint with Clare Pollard. Their poetry embraces storytelling, ecopoetics, liminality and queer identity. Their current favorite example of the Order Lepidoptera is Gonepteryx rhamni
