Poem for my daughter on what would have been her fifteenth birthday

Risen

Photo by Tirza van Dijk on Unsplash

Fifteen years is a long time. But it is also yesterday.

For anyone who doesn’t know our story:

We lost our daughter fifteen years ago on a spring day full of blue sky. She died during an emergency crash delivery. She was an IVF baby, very much loved, very much wanted. Later, an investigation was carried out and clinical negligence was flagged around our care. Later still, after five rounds of IVF and two miscarriages, we called it a day and decided to embrace childlessness. It’s been a journey.

It’s a strange thing to try and imagine what she would look and be like now. The further we get from her death, the harder it is. When I try to imagine her, I see a version of myself at her age, but that isn’t who she would be. She would have been her own person and the fact she didn’t get to be her own person breaks my heart. It is still breaking my heart. That fierce mothering instinct doesn’t go away, not ever.

Each year on her birthday, which is also the anniversary of her death, I make sure to remember her in a way that is more than just the daily thoughts about her that I have. Writing her birthday poem, exploring the passage of time, exploring grief as an instinctive reaction to death is one way that I do that.

The experience of this loss has changed me as a person, has gifted me a different way of looking at the world.

Today her birthday has fallen on Easter Sunday. I can hear kids in the village having an eater egg hunt. It is joyful. This is as it should be.

Risen


Today I wish to roll back the stone 
and bring out of the tomb a fifteen-year-old version
of the baby I buried. 

All will be undone. A miracle. 
The rose petals rising like mist from the earth-hole, 
her white coffin suddenly empty, 
the pine box held up to the crowd for effect. 

The grave will no longer feel familiar, 
the toys binned, no longer holding
the reverence of votives to the dead.
The plot will be vacated. Someone else 
can kneel there now.

The crowd will hush and grin as we 
hold hands, walk through the fields of lambs
to home, where we’ll sit and watch trash TV 
ignore the faces pressed against the glass. 

I can’t imagine what comes next. 
A flock of holy doves?
An ordinary conversation about school? 

Today this will have to do: 
pink roses, a soft grey light, the peace 
of the Sunday morning cemetery,
crows nesting in the beech above our heads.