This much we know.

For some of us, memory and its words 

will one day fall away, a crumbling cliff-edge

with no hand-holds to haul ourselves back. 

      For others, still here,

grasping at ideas, gasping for air, 

it seems there’s an alternative finale,

not merely unannounced, but unforeseen.

      Hence this gunpowder trail of lost moments

 that keeps flashing across my synapses, 

jolting me awake with a rattling reprise 

of scenes from the past, a kind of 

old-school black-and-white newsreel 

that comes roaring over me, 

stuck here in the sixpenny seats.

      Here’s the garden air-raid shelter 

where we children used to play.

Here, an infants’ school Alice in Wonderland,

I struggle to remember the script.

Here, an adolescent migrant,

seeing my mother as if for the first time,

I set out to redefine myself.                                                                      

The slide-show accelerates: 

… here’s my father instructing me to

listen for the countermelody,

… here’s me, singing, cantering my thoroughbred

along an unexplored bush track, 

… here’s me taking a new name, to replace the one 

my young self could never pronounce,

Here’s me at a fancy-dress party, 

where even my grown children

have no idea who I am,

… and here … here, I’m strolling the city

in my favourite cloche hat, 

when a passing colleague bends wordlessly,

without breaking stride, to leave 

a kiss on my cheek.

      Freed from the clamour, 

I find it consoling that, in the end, 

there will be, if not tranquillity, 

some sense of resolution

to lean into.

      I sit in the softening light, 

my old woman’s hands

cradling this fractured vessel of a life,

healed to something like wholeness

by a few filaments of gold.