Damien Becker
This poem has a content note. To view it, click here.
‘Five Child Funerals’ – Caitlin McGregor, 2023.
I.
Wonder why, if she wasn’t religious, her mum
had insisted on a church service. 15, her frame
damp kindling, feathers in a chest. Priest, never
met the kid, keeps mistaking her name. Aunty
shouts our grief at that sacred hollow mouth.
After the hole, we gather, cystic fibrosis kin,
heads bowed by those same ticking spines,
empty boxes waiting to be checked.
II.
Nothing funnier than terminally ill kids. No
laughter like it, spat into cups (analysed by
physios for blood streaks and cepacia) when
he’s prank calling ambulances from his hospital
bed, drip tube amber with beer added to his
antibiotics, tracksuit under jeans to conceal
sapping twigs, fooling every body but his own.
Now no south-eastern suburban halls big
enough to hold all the love for him, PA falling
slapstick in the mud for those outside.
III.
Video montage to The Bangles. Christ.
Mouthing hymns at the guilt-framed photo
with eyes that follow nobody around the room,
blown up from the 4×6 already pinned behind
glass on the adolescent ward memorial, smiles
piled up in layers like middens or noticeboards
in Brunswick Street of gigs from last summer.
IV.
Funerals happen without enough notice. I’ve
got a maths exam on tomorrow and Nathalia
by train is further than the moon and back, so
it’s just a death notice in The Sun, dictated over
the sales phone line, edited so hard to keep it
under ten words that it becomes poetry, saving
a week’s paperboy wage.
V.
There are baby-sized coffins, which nobody
knows until we do, grief like all the bones
collapsed, like the sky was eaten, memory book
one photo long.
To hear Damien read his poem ‘Five Child Funerals’, click below.
Damien Becker is a writer from Murwillumbah, living and working on Bundjalung Country. His poetry has been published by Australian Poetry Journal, Verity La, Red Room Poetry, and Bramble Journal, among others. As a spoken word artist, he is a winner of the Bunker Spoken Word Prize, an Australian Poetry Slam State Champion and National Finalist. He lives with cystic fibrosis and is a double-lung transplant recipient.