Wednesday afternoon
a slice of blue sky drifts past
my window, i pay attention
to the way it is surrounded
how it will be back later, as water

i have been given this
as a gift, the ability to see
the woods for the forest, the
wonder

my son, who has had to learn how to find his way through the world with his senses raw to the clamouring, the noise, the rules he doesn’t get, doesn’t know how to make sense of
—except that i am his map and his torch, his rock, and his voice
—asks me when his diabetes will go away, tells me he is tired of the way it forces things onto him
mostly, he is speaking of endless servings of juice and biscuits in an afternoon of hypos, he is
an unfolding man
awash in puberty and hormones

earlier, a stranger asked me

‘what do you think your purpose is in this life? what have you come here to do?’

always, before i can shape words like ‘writer’, or ‘i want to make the world beautiful’, always the word
‘healer’ jumps up
onto her bare feet, from where she was sitting minding her own business at the back of my life,
climbing into the cavern of my right eye, holding my orbital bone as ballast
settling herself down on the edge of my field of vision, swinging her legs against my cheek
always this quiet dare
the way she holds my tongue hostage in case i choose a life that is not the one meant for me

i forget
or rather, i try and talk myself out of it

there are things that simply are
there are things i cannot fix

healer

my son waits patiently for an answer, his faith so full
and at peace
in his mother’s ability
to keep her promises, to make things better

i wonder at the weight of the word sitting inside my eye
how to explain the words
‘never’ and ‘forever’ to a heart
like his
pure as sky-water, always believing anything is
possible

i search my days for a way to soften the blow.

© Liezel Graham 2023

{📷 Oscar Nord, on Unsplash}

words about my wide-open-heart boy who believes his mum can fix anything, or at the very least provide him with answers, and the irony of wanting, more than anything, to see people healed of anything that holds them, and not always being able to.

liezel