Upstairs
by Ron Carey
Lying on the bed with my mother,
Wearing my father’s Alpaca overcoat.
Here, Upstairs, where the air is old
And the blue-painted radiators are singing
And the cold cream is liquefying on the dressing table.
My mother can no longer take the cold.
My father was my age when he died.
I look like him everyone says I look SO like him everyone says.
I had to think when she asked me to wear the coat,
For a moment I had to think about it like I didn’t know what she meant.
It was then she called me Danny too many times Danny she called me.
Please, Danny, she said.
So I put on the coat.
She wants to lie down the pain for a moment, just for a moment,
On to the pink candlewick spread, Upstairs, where her body will not take her.
So I lift her in my arms. So light. Oh! Sarah you are SO light. I carry her.
Up. To the age before one is old.
Up where Sarah and Danny once moved in the fluid
Of young bodies and slept, hot to the touch.
We pretend to sleep, Danny and me,
Though I sweat in the coat and I don’t feel well.
But I stay still, for Sarah’s sake I am still.
The afternoon seagulls are mad at something in the garden.
I should investigate because they sound so near and real and mad but I can’t
Because she will not let go of his hand.
After a while, released into the darkness, I get up.
I see very little by the nibbling light of the Sacred Heart.
Sarah. Softly.
Sarah. Quietly.
Sarah. My father’s voice.
And she says nothing she says, nothing.
Leaving me, afraid
That everything might be said and done and said
And she has taken all the cold of the earth into herself.
From Distance. Reproduced with kind permission from Revival Press.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Collection 2016
Distance
Ron Carey
About Ron Carey
Ron Carey (b. 1948, Limerick) has been a winner or finalist in a host of poetry competitions: The Bridport Prize, Lightship International Poetry Prize, Cinnamon Press Poetry Awards, Fish International Poetry Prize, Gregory O’ Donoghue International Poetry Awards, Hugh O’Flaherty Poetry Award, iYeats Poetry Prize and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry – the list goes on.
He says ‘there was a tradition of storytelling and reciting in the family and in the community’ which contributed to his genesis story as a writer. The poems in his shortlisted collection Distance are, he writes, ‘centred on relationships between people in Time and Space’
After a professional life that started on Shannon Industrial Estate, cutting and drilling steel, Carey took up poetry seriously in his 60s while working as a director of an engineering sales company in Dublin. He received an MA in Creative Writing in 2015. He reminds younger poets that ‘a poet does not have to come fully formed out of the workshop.’ Indeed, it is the relationship between ourselves and the world, Carey’s work implies, that produce the meaningful stuff of poetry.
