I don't really have a thing for Andrew Motion, but I read one of his poetry collections recently. I can't say that I was particularly impressed with what I read. One poem, 'Dead March', however, really struck me. I've changed the formatting from that which I found on the internet to that which I remember reading in the book. I don't like how it starts, but I need a responsible adult with a defibrillator to get through the final stanza.

It’s twenty years (It’s not, its twenty-three-

be accurate) since you were whisked away

(I wasn't whisked away: I broke my skull)

and I was left to contemplate your life.

(My life. Ridiculous. You mean my death.)

Well, twenty or twenty-three. I can’t decide

if that’s a long time or no time at all,

or whether everything I've said since then,

and thought, and done, to try and work out how

the way we treat our lives might be involved

with how our lives treat us is more than just

a waste of breath. That’s right. A waste of breath.

You see, you’re always with me even though

you’re nowhere, nothing, dead to all the world

you interrupt me when I start to talk,

you are the shadow dragging at my heels.

This means I can’t step far enough away

to get the thing I want you to explain

in focus, and I can’t lean close enough

to hear the words you speak and feel their weight.

And if I could, what difference would it make?

It’s like I said. I can’t decide. It’s just

that having you suspended all these years

at some clear mid-point between life and death

has made me think you might have felt your way

along the link between the two, and learnt

how one deserves the other. Or does not.

I feel I’m standing on a frozen pond

Entranced by someone else below the ice,

a someone who has found out how to breathe

the water and endure the cold and dark.

I know I ought to turn my back. I can’t.

I also know that if I just stay put

and watch the wax-white fingers flop about

I’ll start to think they must be beckoning.

I stare and stare and stare and stare and stare.

It’s twenty years since you were whisked away,

or twenty-three. That’s more than half my life.