Speech with a Dying Friend:

Come Lazarus,  come sit up

and have a chat with me these last minutes;

remember that day we played down the sideway

you were six and I five,

you lifted my blue dress up to my waist

and dropped small stones onto my yellow panties

as you sang, ‘When Johnny comes Marching Home Again.’

My mother caught us and on the way home you hid

on the floor of the car, terrified of meeting your mother.

Come Lazarus, just sit for a time,

sit up and talk some more

about the summers by the ocean;

remember the pier at Rye?

You were fifteen and we dove together, your hand slipped

and touched my breast, we kissed that evening

sitting on the grass between your father’s tent,

and mine,the tea tree's rough bark rubbing urgently

against my skin. The stars shone above 

and your brother, his white teeth sparkling, threw water over us.

Please Lazarus, stand up for me.

I want to hear your voice, I remember when

you would sometimes whisper into the conch of my ear,

your words thrumming into my brain. I remember

the way you screamed and laughed all those summers ago

as our families holidayed at Ocean Grove

and how when I got lost in Spooky Forest, and the light

started to diminish so that shadows confused me further,

you were the one who found me, your voice

called out my name so loudly

I was able to follow it out of the maze.

I know our lives have separated since then

but those nights and days still have their place

and even though our adult minds pretend importance

those memories are as dear to me now

as when they first happened.

Please Lazarus, life has been cruel to me -

two children lost to drugs

and a third in prison

but the memories of you have held me

through some of those dark evenings

and in the back of my mind  like an unsung bell, is always 

an ‘if only and maybe’.

Please Lazarus, my beauty is long gone

and my skin once smooth

now wrinkles like the ocean, I feel everything moving beyond me,

past some point where I will no longer exist,

but you are always in my background,

always a hope, a possibility.

Please Lazarus come back to me.