Poems from an Atheist.
Please start at the bottom of my blog page as this is more personal and you may find my poetry amateurish and depressing. (which it is!)
It is now one year since my eldest son, Greg, died. He had a heart attack on the evening of Julia Gillards’ election, while the hung parliament had yet to be resolved. He was well enough to walk down all the stairs to the waiting ambulance, but had another attack on the Sunday night. One by one his organs folded up and he died officially on
Tuesday 24 th August 2010 at the age of 51. As with many Aboriginal men, hard drinking and self abuse as a younger man caused liver damage to strike him down at an early age.
Greg was committed to Aboriginal Rights and worked for many years with his sister Cathy, Helen Boyle, the Murray
Greg and I also established the Aboriginal Rights Coalition to protest the Northern Territory Intervention. Cathy and I are currently doing what we can to reestablish and reinvigorate the Aboriginal Rights Coalition (Sydney) and will include a wider ambit of Aboriginal issues as well as the Intervention. See, for example, the piece on Aboriginal health and homelessness in Port Hedland (WA), where Aboriginal patients have to camp outside the Hospital, living in the open and nursed by their families. (ABC 24 hrs news on 15/08/11 –EST time 19.03 hrs.) . Or the article on the mining trainees at Port Hedland, where some of the 900 Aboriginals forced to taker up any offered training and employment in the mines that are gutting the country, regardless if it is located hundreds of kilometers away from their homelands or lose their unemployment benefits. Note that taxpayers have paid the mine owners hundreds of thousands of dollars for the training and employment of these Aboriginal people. (ABC17/08/11 –EST 15.32 hrs-). Yet only 300 ex trainees are employed (at virtual slave labour rates of $50 per day) and are not given access to the skilled employment for which they have been trained.
Next week, on August 24th 2011 , my ex-husband, his partner and Greg’s sisters and surviving brother will be in Carnarvon Gorge in Central Queensland , to return Greg’s ashes to our Home Country. Unfortunately my doctor says I can’t go up there as I would be 70 or 80 k’s from the nearest town, (Rolliston) and probably much further from a hospital.
It was only when Greg died that I started writing poetry. I couldn’t seem to find anything hat had been written from the point of view of an atheist or an agnostic to use at his cremation. At first I tried to be sensitive to the beliefs of others but later I felt that the agnostic position was not satisfactory for me. So here it is…. for what it’s worth.
Big
by Pat Eatock
We never talk of death in this society
Well, not much; not often; --
A subject that we all can do without, or so we think.
We see enough of death on our TVs
The news, far away wars that barely get a mention:
We see a body in a street and think of it no more
As long as it was not an Aussi soldier
We pay scant attention
Around the world calamaties abound
Tornadoes, with drenching rain and plunging waves
Mountains slide towards the sea
Earth shakes and houses by the dozen collapse in rubble.
While floods take weeks or months to work their wrack and ruin.
We hear the numbers but for the most part death here is well hidden
Tsunami, disease, starvation:
Where does it stop?
We see it everywhere
And when we’ve seen enough
Turn on some film for entertainment.
Reassured that as a favourite actor dies
Tomorrow he will rise, miraculously alive
And ready to die for us in some other guise
Although we know, of course, its him.
A friend of mine once made casual comment
(I don’t recall the words). He spoke of death as of some minor irritation,
like missing a plane, an inconvenience. I turned on him, insistent
But Death is Big I said.
Its not some silly game that lets you get up and dust yourself off again
Death is being dead I said . It lasts forever.
You may believe some other world exists,
or reincarnation may be your thing
Yet buried deep, or when only ash remains.
The mechanism for thought and memory is gone.
So where do we go? What happens to our life?
Are our spirits, our souls, like God,
concepts designed by man to comfort us in grief
or hide our fear behind?
DEATH IS BIG! Too big to comprehend!
Like the Hubble floating out far above the earth
Ignoring all the millions of suns that we call stars,
diminishing their enormity in our ignorance
By use of such a small, small word.
The billions of planets, the plethora of pulsating galaxies:
But Hubble aimed its view at a small blank slice of space
And cranking up its telescope again, and again, and again,
Revealed far distant galaxies
with more beyond, and more, and more.
We strain our brains and try to comprehend.
This is our universe, like time itself,
Never ending and without beginning
Before “our” Big Bang, the Bangs of others, and of others, and of others
So to each and every individual, death is like the universe.
Death is BIG! Death is GIGANTIC!
Death of ourselves or the death of others close to us,
Impossible to comprehend.
Stretching our small brains,
Trying to expand our understanding
To wrap our heads around it all…
Straining… Head aching… aching… aching…,
DEATH IS GY-NORM-OUS!
But I only know little things.
I know he isn’t here.
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