An Edith poem I wrote that doesn’t fit into the book.

Peidi was Freddy’s nickname for Edith, I think because it rhymes with Edie, but we’ll never know.

The ‘poem about death’ is from Khalil Gibran’s The Phrophet (1923), a minor anachronism But I’m taking poetic liberties.

I wrote this after reading a friend’s poetry collection (Five Fifty-Five, give it a read), which is why the terms ‘finite’ (a quote from Buzz Aldrin used as an epigraph for friend’s poem “Counting Down”) and ‘summer lawn’ (a phrase taken from friend’s poem “UnEnglished”) are in quotation marks.

If you enjoy this epistolary style, I can reccomend Fred & Edie by Jill Dawson, which consists largely of fictional letters written to Freddy by Edith in Holloway.

“Epistle”

I want to write about beatiful things. Freddy, darlint, darlint Freddy will you keep me, always keep me, the way you promised?

Someone tried to save us from this by giving us snow to walk through in Guilford Place, where everything was pale with frost and the street lamps shone.

I miss you. Are we going to die? A friend has just read a poem about how the dead never leave you, the dead never die. Will that be our fate, to linger and pulse with some non-existent force?

I think of those days we spent in Shanklin and I want them so much my soul aches. I want you so much my soul hurts. I think of a ‘summer lawn’ like in another poem this friend has just read, an endless summer lawn stretching out far and away and forever, like the grass in Wanstead park, will we ever be there again?

I love you.

I sit with my paper in Holloway and I scribble and scribble the hours away, the ‘finite’ hours I cling to so desperately. We are running out of time. I want to hold you.

In a matter of weeks it will be over, we’ll leave this world that we love so much, to think of the compact we made, and now! They will carry it through. We are cargo to be dispatched. You have been everywhere, I know. I went to Paris once but have scarcely set foot out of London, and now we are both to die here. 

Here is a poem about death.

    
    Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
    Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.
    Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king?
    Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?

    For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
    And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

    Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
    And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
    And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Are we to melt into the sun, to truly dance? I have danced always, but am I to keep going? Wherever I’m going I long for you. It sounds more bearable, put like that. I should like to dance a foxtrot with death. In dreams is hidden eternity, do you believe that? When I think what we dreamt of mere months ago and how it has brought us to this, I see no eternity, only an end to something that cannot last that long.

Do you still love me? Will that, at least, last forever? Perhaps that is our eternal dream. I shall keep it and shelter it and keep it safe from the harsh winter cold.

With all my love,

Peidi