More National Poetry Month!

second in a series...

Susan

Having her entire family killed in one moment
Shocked her out of the world
Of nylons and invitations.

For two weeks after the train accident she cried.
Men she didn't know stroked her back.
Her flatmate folded up her red silk dress
From where she let it fall
After she heard the news.

In later years she was seen
With grey in the seams of her raven hair
Assisting a doctor at a child's bedside.
Amputation. Death. Losses.
The children, when she passed their beds,
Would reach their arms to her and smile.

At home, a husband, two sons, and books.
A garden in the windowsill.
Flowers on Lucy and Peter and Edmund's graves.

She was buried in another place, next to the man she married
The man whose legs intertwined hers.
I cannot say for sure,
But I would like to think
She too reached Heaven.


Editor's Note 1: It took me until... now... to realize that the giant railway accident in The Last Battle, the one which managed to kill off every single human character in the series except Susan ('cos she was too busy running around with boyfriends to bother to meet her family at the station), was C. S. Lewis' version of the Rapture.

Editor's Note 2: I found out after I wrote this that Neil Gaiman had already written it (click on each individual jpeg to see the pages). He made the adult Susan a professor, which... I never would have guessed. ^__^