So Brightly At The Last

I was having a hard time choosing what to post tonight but I've just come across a poem, the reading of which has stopped me in my tracks. It's by Clive James, the great Australian broadcaster, journalist, critic, author and poet, who is terminally ill with Leukaemia. It's heartbreakingly beautiful. I can't bring myself to write anything of my own now. Instead, I hope you will take a few minutes to read the poem.

The blip has chosen itself now. Sometimes you just have to surrender to a deeper process than any one of us will ever understand.

Japanese Maple

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

‘Japanese Maple’ by Clive James was first published in the New Yorker, © Clive James, 2014