do not stand at my grave and weep original version

In fact, there is but a meniscus separating these visual flights from cliché. If this poem rested simply on its imagery, it would end up little more than an algorithm. The ripened grain is mentioned in standard English – not via the hands of Ninkasi, Demeter or Neper.Īll of the imagery is basic – it’s the fodder of murals painted along primary school corridors. By this I mean there are no literary references. The scansion in some of the lines could be improved, the channel eased. The artist hasn’t paused to administer each glint of light from the bristles’ point, but gone in roughshod with sweeping brush strokes. The poem is amateur and all the better for it. We shared a moment clasped in the same grip – dementia or not, it had levelled us. In the room we were in, the still that followed the reading was a pregnant aftermath.

The muscles that contort eye shape prior to weeping tensed. The woman’s eyes bulged as the last two lines were read out. I run it here without any as the rhythm waives the need for it in any case.) (there are versions online with tiny differences in grammar. Presently, the social worker hit upon the following poem: This can often work with people with dementia – it seems to connect to a different part of the brain. There was someone else in the flat: the lady’s social worker who was trying to establish a bond by quoting popular rhymes and songs to her.

She was like a woman catching glimpses of herself in a mirror and seeing an imposter increasingly take her place. She would parrot sentences, become horrified of herself for doing so, apologise and then continue repeating them afresh. She was in the cruel position shared by thousands: bearing witness to the illness consuming her, but simultaneously losing ground to it. This was because she had started wandering and getting collected by Police during the small hours. The triggers were there to monitor when she got up in the middle of the night, and track her movements around the building and if she left it. I was installing sensor equipment in an elderly woman’s flat close to Marble Arch. When I first encountered the work of Mary Elizabeth Frye, I was at work in central London.

Do not stand at my grave and weep original version