Cornflower Blue

Cornflower Blue
was the song on the tape,
Cornflower Blue
on that lost weekend,
that last weekend.
Cornflower Blue.

As we pushed you round
the Harlestone Circular
through the bluebell wood
to the gingerbread house,
walkers were too polite
or too embarrassed
to stare at your wheelchair
bumping and lurching
along the rutted track.
The countryside
wasn't made for it.

Later you sat bolt upright in your bed,
eyes transfixed in a laser beam stare.
You couldn't speak.
Your brain tumour had seen to that.

For us, wine and cigarettes
dulled the pain.
We went to bed,
laughing loudly
to prevent us crying.

A week later
in a phone box with my dad
we heard that you had died.
Suddenly
my dad seemed older
and smaller.

We went back to the Norfolk cottage
and told my mother, who wrung her hands,
looking, beyond the cows,
at some point in the middle distance,
stoical to the end.

But my gaze swivelled up
away from the flint farms and mucky lanes,
into the big sky above
hanging like a blue lantern.

Cornflower blue, oh cornflower blue,
yes, it was cornflower blue.