On Monday I sat with hospital patients to ask my final set of questions about love - how do you carry the memory of love? Can you describe your parents' faces?
The questions were my solution to the impossibility of running a poetry workshop on a ward. I sat and took notes as people who were able talked about family, partners and children. At the beginning of the project I read people poems but by the end felt that my questions might have the same effect. Ten hours isn't really enough to know what works and experiment with different approaches.
Each week on the train from Brighton and walking along the Fulham Road to the hospital - Chelsea and Westminster - I was conscious of the barrier: a patient in a bed, me coming in from outside. Add poetry into the equation and sometimes I felt like an alien, although the staff were all so young, at least I had age in common with the patients.
Now younger patients will take the poem and work with Rambert on choreography in response to these lines that have come from those 10 hours questioning what love means when you're confined to a bed in a ward, sometimes exhausted, sometimes frustrated by your own body.
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| Photo by Giya Makondo-Wills |
I
ask
What is your heart and what is it
carrying?
It's
not about the heart,
it's
the whole body, you answered -
a
tree - almond or apple -
and
inside, the background music.
Are some people harder to love?
My
sister laughed behind my back.
There
was someone I trusted with a secret.
In
six months we tiptoed from fun
to
arguing. I told her I'd been on a date.
What journeys did you make and what did
you find?
I
walked the backbone of Ireland -
from
Dublin to Cork - dogs barked from kennels,
joggers
overtook, pigs stood in my way.
And
I crossed the Sahara for two days,
took
a train to Nguru,
heard
a general as he beat a young boy.
I
met her in London, 1954,
a year after the earthquake on Kefalonia
killed
her father and sister.
How do you carry the memory of love?
One
sent her vegetables, all kinds of vegetables
others
said in my daughter, my partner, my god
one
held the light on the water in Venice
another
Barbados, her grandmother's voice
one
heard a mobile ringing
another,
the roll call of all 14 siblings
one
felt rough tweed against her tired face
another
feared she got back less than she gave
one
smiled - my mother, 92 and still dancing -
another
hummed his dad's favourite song
and
the last said when he was young
love
was spelled lust.
Describe your mother's face, your
father's
First
comes the shape of the mouth,
curve
of a jaw, then laughter lines,
ears,
smooth ovals of skin
and
only then, the eyes' colours -
blue,
brown, grey - until,
as
if under that gaze again
they
are led to the exact day
of
a soldier's haircut, his stutter
and
in the hallway, the draught
of
parents' softly spoken
shorthand,
her Norwegian,
and
for another, the affair, divorce
until
he has a photo of his father,
a
child, in his hands and she can admit:
"In
her dementia, my mother loves me at last."
And what are the tokens of love?
It
happened so fast, the results, diagnosis
how
much we needed to send him to Boston.
He's
only seven. Hand to mouth, we went,
site
to site, Facebook and Twitter
one
told another, at work and at school,
in
football crowds, post-office queues,
we
grew like a flock of red-billed quelea
folding
around him a soft cloak of feathers.