On the day my mother died, we walked
away from her crumpled blue figure
empty of love like a squeezed grape,
out of the machinery of death’s hospital.

And paced down the emptiness of Museum St
where bulldozers ate the guts of my old friends
the Wesley Church, the Theosophical Society, and a
red-brick two-storey place that held ballet classes;

Into the New Art Gallery: cool and sleek
as a hollowed-out sandstone cave, a tomb
filled with glistening tubes of plumbing
and paintings refrigerated along the walls.

We looked out across the city; sunlight
rebounding from the glazed face of buildings
white in rows of silence;
I heard the grunts, fell the bristle of Time.

I saw the soul of my mother escaping back
to country towns where she larrikined as a girl
in the back seats of uproarious Fords.
And with her goes my heart my life.

(published in Westerly, Vol.25, No.3)