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Photo haiku

on June 08, 2021

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the easing of grief

a stone beneath the cypress

becomes a small frog

https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/may-haiku-challenge/

frog haiku Tricycle

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Poem ~ Never

Never For Mam, 1st December 1932 ~ 25th March 2021 Grief keeps changing its shape – a weight like a kilo bag of sugar compressing my lungs, sometimes a water smoothed stone that fits perfectly in the palm of my hand. Yesterday the heaviest of winter coats that refused to keep out the chill. Today, I woke and heard birdsong through the early morning mist and remembered the last words you wrote the month before you died – It’s good to be positive and looking ahead, Lynne . So here I am running the lanes looking for all the things I would have shared with you: the planting of young laurels along the hedgerow on St Vincent’s Lane, the way the moss has grown sparsely on one side of the stone bridge but thickly on the other, and how someone has laid a plank across the stream to cross from bank to bank. I think I understand now that grief remains with us. And I never had to say, Don’t go, please stay, because you never left me. Mam, the white wood anemones are like a carp

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I started running at the end of 2015 in an attempt to get as fit as I possibly could before reaching 60. Then it became a series of challenges to see what I could accomplish: 5k and 10k races, an alpine-like trail race across the mountains at the back of my hometown, Port Talbot, in South Wales, running 1000k in a year, a half marathon, and another half marathon, so I could at least say I'd run a whole one! It became social and supportive, running with a group of women every week. And it became a tool for my emotional and psychological well-being too. That became startlingly evident in 2020 when the first Covid pandemic lockdown coincided with my diagnosis of recurring breast cancer. I ran throughout that Spring and Summer until surgery at the end of October. Then my Dad died of Covid in December and, three months later, Mam died, her failing health exacerbated by losing her partner of 72 years. It took me far more time to start running again than the surgeon had suggested, undo

Reflection ~ On being the next in line to die

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