This is a poem I wrote about that strange, difficult time between first biopsy and official diagnosis, a void where all kinds of awful anxieties rear their heads and sometimes what’s coming out of your mouth, even with loved ones, seems a million miles from your reality. I hope someone can relate.
Cold winter ridge as the joggers pant by
Metallic board against white sky.
You pause at the top and the view stops breath
It takes you a while to figure it out
Look, there’s St Paul’s dwarfed by the Shard
A fleeting glimpse of Westminster
The Millennium Dome a mere step from the City
Caught in the curves of the unseen river, distances collapse.
In the foreground, children play five-a-side football.
A train whines thinly, culverted
From Tufnell Park to Gospel Oak.
Your son says that it only took him half an hour to get here
He should know
He’s a veteran of five hundred Waterloo Sunsets.
When he was a child, you used to go
To the Natural History Museum,
In those strange, unreal days between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve
Do you remember? you ask
I remember the Tube he replies
Looking out of the window at the wires, and thinking they were worms.
Basically, everything south of the river is marsh, he says
The North’s much hillier.
If the Russians ever hack the Barrier, I’ll be screwed
My place will be one of the first under water.
So would millions, says his dad, it would be catastrophic
You try to imagine it, but your mind stalls.
The two of them talk of probabilities and fail-safe mechanisms,
And as your eyes scan for familiar signals
The only one that you can see is abnormal
A white lump on a routine scan that you’ll know more about next week.
You want to say all kinds of things
Mainly, I’m scared. Hug me. Don’t go.
But that would all be premature
Too weighty for this mundane moment.
Meanwhile, London goes about its business.
Your son needs to leave now – he’s seeing a film
He asks you if you want to come
As the three of you start to descend.
You decline. It’s Chaplin’s City Lights
And silent movies aren’t your thing.
Later, you wonder if you should have gone.
You might not see him again for a while.
What if……what if?
The barrier slips.
You brace against a tidal wave.
Oh, don’t be silly. Everyone tells you about a friend
This happened to, and now they’re fine.
Everyone has options, don’t they?
Theoretically, at least.
We all have choices,
Until, one day, we don’t.
