Each week during Australian Poetry Month, a poet walks us through one of their works. Here, the 17-year-old poet reflects on being ‘deeply moored to’ memories of his great-aunt’s last days
You go your whole life believing
dying is the easy part, then one day
your great aunt gets a brain tumour the size of a
kumquat burrowing inside her hippocampus, and
you watch her suffocate for hours before passing.
In the hospital, in her last moments, she tells you,
between spoonfuls of room-temperature baby corn,
Dying is a thankless job. What a line, you think, and you
write it down on your phone. Dying is a thankless job.
You leave her room without wiping the corn stuck
to the corners of her lips she cannot reach. Her striped
pink towel, folded over a leather chair by the door.
Her wrists, suspended in a froth of August sunlight.
Her beeping, fading behind you as you walk down
the hallway, trying out the line on other grieving
patients. Dying is a thankless job. Mostly, they don’t react,
but you learn that all the doctors here use fruits
as metaphors for growths: this lump in your breast
is as big as a grape, this cyst in your stomach,
an apple. You think this is the wrong crowd
for the line. You just haven’t found your
people yet. Dying is a thankless job. You will
use that line in a poem one day – one where
you will not acknowledge your great aunt. One
where you will not need grief to make the poem
work. One you will write when you are finally living
your quiet, uneventful, upper-middle-class suburban life,
where you set lilies in lusterware vases all afternoon.
Where you make a fruit salad for your two perfect
children, pack it into two green plastic boxes, take them
out for a picnic, yelling cows as you pass cows, driving
for hours past endless rows of powerlines jewelled in rain,
until you find an orchard where you can finally sit and
write while your children run through acres of fig trees,
picking the fruit with their hands, forgetting the salad you
worked so hard on, rotting in their bags. How much
sweeter the figs taste because they aren’t for them.