breath

I am trying to breathe
like the slow, low purr of a drowsy cat
like the languid sway of an empty swing
like the shiver of a thistle in the wind

like someone about to stop breathing entirely

I look for that place
where breath becomes so light it vanishes,
pulls away like a small plane turning steeply
and heading up, straight up,
fishbone thin in a thin blue sky

then gone
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© Sarah Broom, 1972 – 2013

Published in Gleam, Auckland University Press, 2013

Reproduced here with permission.

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About The Poem:

Sarah Broom’s posthumous collection Gleam was published in August of this year, three months after Sarah’s death in April. I posted my personal eulogy for Sarah here — and said at that time how much I was looking forward to reading Gleam.

I have since had that very great joy, in reading the poetry, and sorrow, for loss of the poet. To sum up the collection, I can do no better than quote Selina Guinness’s obituary for Carcanet, Sarah’s UK publisher:  “Gleam … is a collection written in extremis, and contains some of the most beautiful and startling poems about dying I have ever read.”

So I am honoured to feature one of my favourite poems from the collection, breath, with you today. I feel it is particularly poignant because Sarah was being treated for lung cancer* throughout the the writing of the collection and breath is possibly the poem that speaks most directly to her illness. Despite the use of repetition and layering of simile and image:

“like the slow, low purr of a drowsy cat
like the languid sway of an empty swing
like the shiver of a thistle in the wind”

the poem is emotionally spare, even remote, like that:

“small plane turning steeply
and heading up, straight up,
fishbone thin in a thin blue sky

then gone”

acquiring considerable power through the juxtaposition.

I hope you will both enjoy the poem and feel what Glenn Colquhoun would call its “ache“, as I did on first encountering it when reading Gleam.

* For those who might feel inclined to be judgmental, I note that Sarah never smoked.

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Sarah Broom

About The Poet:

Sarah Broom’s first poetry collection, Tigers at Awhitu, was published by Auckland University Press (AUP) in 2010, and simultaneously by Carcanet Press in the UK.  She has also written Contemporary British and Irish Poetry: An Introduction, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006.  Her second collection, Gleam, was published by Auckland University Press in August 2013. To hear Sarah read from and discuss Tigers at Awhitu, click on the following Scottish Poetry Library podcast interview: Sarah Broom.

Sarah died on April 18, 2013, after a five year illness with lung cancer. She is survived by her husband and three children.
.

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