Poems by Annick Yerem
This month, we are excited to bring you poetry from the widely-published Scottish/German poet Annick Yerem. Annick lives and works in Berlin and is an avid lover of dogs and cake. She tweets @missyerem and you can find some of her words @publicpoetry, RiverMouthReview, #PoetRhy, Anti-Heroin-Chic, Rejection Letters Dreich and 192. https://linktr.ee/annickyerem Thank you for joining our family of Rainbow Poets, dear Annick!
Companion
Morning or night
your upturned faces
a reminder each shift
on how to carry trust
How a human needs sun and
air and warmth to feel just that
Sometimes I sit in the back row
at your funerals trying to grasp
all of you who you were
before you came into my care
Before we shaved off your beard
after 50 years
before you forgot your wife`s name
and your daughter´s age
before you lost that wealth of words
you’d been carrying all your life
At night, I can hear the dying
whisper their heartbreak
fills hallways of stories
untold
*** Content Warning: ECT ***
Your daughter
Who were you before me? If I unlocked you
would I become unharmed? Why did you walk
over those waters, was it to get away from me?
You went home, smells and sounds ingrained
into my memories, this longing I carry with me
this wanting more or just enough to be.
Someone else inhabits your skin, she is devout,
soft-spoken, almost all the jagged edges gone,
the world scares her, but she scares herself
most of all. She is a stranger to me as you were,
an imprint of what happened, a frozen statue
slowly thawing and dissolving.
What happened to your brain back then?
They sent that voltage through it again
and again. Did they pave a path for it to
calcify, to leave you with lapses and losses?
Outside, clouds lifted, birds sang, brave animals
crossed our paths. You chanted names of trees
and flowers. Yet something dark, something that
burned through wood so fast the embers singed
your hands, something lurking just beneath the
surface, so frightening I couldn’t tell a soul, because
I feared you had lost yours and I was to blame.
You breathed all your darkness into me, I lived
inside little pockets of trust, carved skillfully into
my landscaped eyes. I became all mine to save myself.
