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Poem Of The Week Children's Special: Leaving By Rhiannon Oliver

Leaving

We have to leave the smell in the hall.
We can’t pack the bumpy wallpaper
Or the way the back door squeaks
When you lean on it.
We can’t take the neighbours,
Or their cakes,
Or the closeness of the church bells
That ding dong their wedding song
On sunny Saturdays.

We have to leave the sunshine that
Joins me on my pillow before school.
We can’t bring the corner garden wind
And the way it sneaks past the bbq (we have to leave)
And into the kitchen (we have to leave)
To tell us our sausages are ready.

Love we have to leave!
Mum’s voice bounces off the ceiling
for the last time.

We have to leave.
I leave my breath in the walls
And sigh goodbye to the house
That will stay in my bones.

Illustration credit Chris Riddell

Rhiannon Oliver’s rather beautiful and profoundly honest poem is more than a simple elegy for the feeling of emptiness that often attends a departure. ‘Leaving’ is aimed at children, in whom the anchor of a sense of proportion is absent, and for whom a sense of loss is proportionately magnified. The word ‘flit’, in the context of leaving a cherished home, seriously betrays the emotional impact of such an elemental dislocation.

Oliver’s litany of ‘leavings’ – the incidental furniture of our lives whose presence is mostly quotidian but invested with heightened personal meaning – is rendered with heartbreaking clarity. Each appeal to the senses, each reminder of what the newly deracinated child, and parent, will miss, is detailed as though in retreat, exacerbated by the knowledge that it will be left behind for good.

Even in sensory abstraction – the light falling at a particular angle across a pillow; the ‘corner garden wind’; the ‘wedding song’ of the church bells – an especial kind of presence is inviolably bound up with location and to that extent is irreplaceable.

In abstraction, too, the echoing, disembodied voice of warning congealing into the mother figure’s final valediction – ‘Love we have to leave!’, and a reminder that the act of leaving is a binary process: that the love we take is returned, sustaining in the fabric of memory:

‘I leave my breath in the walls
And sigh goodbye to the house
That will stay in my bones.’

‘Leaving’ will appear in Sky Surfing: Excellent Adventures in a Poetry Balloon to be published later this year by Yorkshire Times Publishing. The poem is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.

More information here.

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