GRIEF Poem: Left Ear, by Nicole deHoop

Four steel posts through a tender lobe
One for each year of innocence
Four is a tender age
For your whole world to shatter
In sticky fragments on the kitchen floor
An explosion of glass and jam
That my mother couldn’t hear
It’s a tender age
To hold your mother’s crying face
Between your own small hands
As you chant ‘it will be okay’
And the baby cries from the other room

Three more scar my cartilage
One for each year of service
It’s a tender age
To pretend to be the secretary again
She says it’s a game
But your stomach twists and knots anyway

Seven barbs of metal nestled into flesh
One for each year of childhood
Seven is a tender age
To hide the bubbling fear
At seeing your mother’s scars
They snake across a hairless scalp
Angry mad-scientist stitches
Radiating out from her left ear
You bury your horror because
She can hear again
As the magnets do their work
Sort of, from the left side, for the most part

Seven years’ apprenticeship
Now a master hand
My adorned and studded ear
Armouring a soft seashell of sound

Author: poetryfest

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