#WordyAndWheelyWednesdays: A poem for Jane, fifteen years on

Hello my lovely readers

A very short preamble to this week's post, because I'm uploading it whilst staving off exhaustion after a very long long-haul flight home from South Africa. I'm trying to ensure I wait for bed 'til a sensible time, though, despite being two hours ahead. I also really wanted to post this poem. It's one I  wrote on Sunday 12th, to mark our school Occupational Therapist, Jane's, fifteenth anniversary. She had a very significant impact on me, and I wanted to honour that. So, without further ado, and love and spoons until next week:

12/01/2020

Young teenage me wrote you a poem too.

It got stuck on the memorial wall –

one of those gaudily bright display places

more appropriate to primary than secondary.

But I guess that’s what ‘special’ schools are.

I guess as well that I was still a kid,

not yet blasé about bereavement.

You were only number four, after all,

although my first adult. Yet, well, so young

and such a spiritual sister it still felt wrong.

I couched my confusion in Comic Sans

and clichés; a premade border of butterflies

built into Microsoft Word the inane inspiration

for metaphors to numb my muddled mind.

A guide for my grief now one of my guides was gone.

The picture is still clear – the poem, the border,

its place on the board, the background brightness.

Even the schoolgirl slope of my once favourite font.

But, though the type is vivid, almost violently so,

I can’t fathom the words it formed.

After a decade and a half, that feels just about okay.

How would several simple sentences have held

my gratitude for what you gave me?

How could little lines convey what it meant

that you took my meanings seriously?

How it felt, in an environment

so innocuously yet insidiously infantilising,

that you honoured our emerging adolescence,

in activities, but above all attitude?

How then the spark of my spirit was snuffed out with yours?

Our sessions stretched beyond

seating systems and special cutlery.

Less Occupational Therapy; more

an Opportunity to Talk about Travel.

The places we’d been, where we each wanted to go.

I was in awe of your plans for India,

then on tenterhooks after the tsunami –

but you came back, and were brimming

with stories, until an untimely lorry

sent you, and all of us, spinning.

There was neither rhyme nor reason in that;

and so I end with none.