THE FAMILY
By Felicity Tillack

Felicity writes: I wrote this poem a few years after moving to Japan for an anthology called Elements of Time. The feelings expressed in the poem are definitely ones I’ve had, though it’s written from a male perspective. I think I liked the image of the man’s coat, and the grown-up nuance it has, falling down as the protagonist melts into memory. For a long time, I felt awkward going home, particularly in the first few years when my brothers were still there, and I was the only one who’d left. The feeling is less acute now we’re all out and making families of our own. I know too that if I was living nearby for longer than a Christmas holiday, that the closeness we enjoyed as kids would return because it hasn’t gone, it’s just waiting beneath the surface. 

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He’s been gone too long.
Those in the house have not forgotten the face,
only the shape of the soul within.
With the awkwardness only a family
of unfamiliar people can have,
they welcomed and withdrew.
His mother, his father, his sisters, his brothers,
fully filling their home with their busy bustling
between buttering bread and placing plates,
the setters and the servers.
While he can only wait, watch,
outside of the rituals and routines,
written off years ago.

And so being apart felt familiar –
more than the noise of his nieces. 
He climbs the hill that has always cradled his parent’s house in its lee.
He walks its scrub strewn streets, 
its withered, winding ways,
well worn when he, when they, walked them.
Explored time over in expeditions to the bedimmed beneaths of bushes;
over lorded by older sister dynasties; 
devastated for dirty battles and strip-mined for staves and stick weaponry. 
Site of seed collections hoarded, lost, forgotten, sprouted.

He remembers the first time he took time to notice the roughness of a tree.
If he thinks hard, can feel the prickle of remembered bumps 
ghosting his fingertips.

He stands by this tree, 
slowly dissolving.
The man’s coat no longer fits. 
If he thinks hard he can still remember, 
the security he felt inside his father’s car;
the pride in helping his mother’s gardening;
the sting of sibling unfairness,
and the warmth of sibling inclusion that even now in exclusion, 
he can feel ghosting him just beneath the skin.

He feels it all so strongly here,
now. 
Will it evaporate with the electric lighting, etching away the dark?
But that he could draw them out here between the trees in the dusk,
let the dimness dissolve the faces’ features and the differences of the years.

Let loose all nieces,
their screams and chatters like a long echo,
to remind the adults of their story.

Mashed-up, remixed, retold. 
Remembered.