SYLVIA DIED TODAY

Sylvia
was it really you
these last weeks of your life?

from the first wide-eyed disbelieving horror
at the ice-killer in your womb

(but you were still strong then,
strong Sylvia, shouting, your blonde hair swinging,
throwing pillows at the nurses
because they tried to move you painfully to a chair
and in the end you broke their ignorance and stayed
regally in bed as they wheeled you to the lift,
laughing behind your hand)

then, in the sad green-tree shaded room of the hospice
you melted, day by day, down to your skin.
New creatures in you took shape

and when I looked you were
a just-hatvhed chick
tiny, white and so beautiful
the fair hair matted to the skull
the fragile claws occasionally waving
as you wove a dream or memory

your gaze of speechless innocence
I shall never forget
I had not thought there was such innocence left in you
you who were always
so wise in your wildness

in that sweet sick room
where patients coughed or retched or bleeped their bleepers
your whispered the secrets of your transformations
to our deaf ears

yesterday you were
a bird with open beak, spreadeagled on the pillow

then you became
a leaf
just pulsing the daylight
the hair-like veins murmuring in your white arm
while death licked at your stalk, hour by hour,
so that at last
you could fly