busker

meningococcus

Perhaps one has to be a parent to really feel the pain. How does one plan for this sort of thing? How then to bear it?

Blake sends me some lines he wrote to stave off the darkest-hour agony.

My son has gone under the hill.
We called him after a clockmaker
but God meets all such whimsy
with his early-striking hands.

That night of his high fever
I held a stream against me,
his heart panicky as a netted bird,
globes of solder on his brow.

Then he was lost in a sea-fret,
the other side of silence,
his eyes milky as snowberries
and his fifteen months unlearned.

They have taken him away
who was just coming to me,
his spine like the curve
of an avocet's bill.