Poem of the Week Children’s Special: Leaving by Rhiannon Oliver

Photo credit: Chris Riddell

Rhiannon Oliver’s quite beautiful and deeply honest poem is more than a simple elegy for the feeling of emptiness that often accompanies saying goodbye. “Leaving” is aimed at children who lack the anchor of a sense of proportion and who have a feeling of loss proportional enlarged. The word “flit” in the context of leaving a beloved home seriously betrays the emotional impact of such a fundamental disruption.

Oliver’s litany of the “abandoned” – the incidental furniture of our lives, whose presence is mostly mundane but endowed with heightened personal significance – is rendered with heartbreaking clarity. Every appeal to the senses, every reminder of what the newly uprooted child and their parent will miss, is described in detail as if they were in retreat, reinforced by the knowledge that they will be left behind forever.

Even in sensory abstraction – the light falling on a pillow at a certain angle; the “corner garden wind”; the “wedding song” of the church bells – a special kind of presence is inextricably linked to the place and is therefore irreplaceable.

Even in abstraction, the echoing, disembodied voice of warning freezes in the mother figure’s final farewell speech – “Darling, we have to go!‘, and a reminder that the act of leaving is a binary process: that the love we receive is reciprocated and preserved in the fabric of memory:

“I leave my breath in the walls.”
And sigh farewell to the house
This will stay in my bones.’

“Leaving” appears in Sky Surfing: Excellent adventures in a poetry balloon will be published by Yorkshire Times Publishing later this year. The poem is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.

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