There has never been another singer who catches at your heart quite like Kate Wolf, who died in 1986 at the age of 44 after a long battle with leukaemia. She is still sorely missed. If I were to pick just two more of her songs I'd choose Across the Great Divide and Give Yourself to Love — though most of her work is exquisite. I played her incessantly all through the weekend my sister visited me in July 1987 — the weekend before she died of a brain tumour aged 29.
Showing posts with label Kate Wolf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kate Wolf. Show all posts
Saturday, 23 July 2016
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Cornflower Blue
Cornflower Blue
was the song on the tape,
Cornflower Blue
on that lost weekend,
that last weekend.
Cornflower Blue.
As we pushed you round
the Harlestone Circular
through the bluebell wood
to the gingerbread house,
walkers were too polite
or too embarrassed
to stare at your wheelchair
bumping and lurching
along the rutted track.
The countryside
wasn't made for it.
Later you sat bolt upright in your bed,
eyes transfixed in a laser beam stare.
You couldn't speak.
Your brain tumour had seen to that.
For us, wine and cigarettes
dulled the pain.
We went to bed,
laughing loudly
to prevent us crying.
A week later
in a phone box with my dad
we heard that you had died.
Suddenly
my dad seemed older
and smaller.
We went back to the Norfolk cottage
and told my mother, who wrung her hands,
looking, beyond the cows,
at some point in the middle distance,
stoical to the end.
But my gaze swivelled up,
away from the flint farms and mucky lanes,
into the big sky above
hanging like a blue lantern.
Cornflower blue, oh cornflower blue.
Yes, it was cornflower blue.
was the song on the tape,
Cornflower Blue
on that lost weekend,
that last weekend.
Cornflower Blue.
As we pushed you round
the Harlestone Circular
through the bluebell wood
to the gingerbread house,
walkers were too polite
or too embarrassed
to stare at your wheelchair
bumping and lurching
along the rutted track.
The countryside
wasn't made for it.
Later you sat bolt upright in your bed,
eyes transfixed in a laser beam stare.
You couldn't speak.
Your brain tumour had seen to that.
For us, wine and cigarettes
dulled the pain.
We went to bed,
laughing loudly
to prevent us crying.
A week later
in a phone box with my dad
we heard that you had died.
Suddenly
my dad seemed older
and smaller.
We went back to the Norfolk cottage
and told my mother, who wrung her hands,
looking, beyond the cows,
at some point in the middle distance,
stoical to the end.
But my gaze swivelled up,
away from the flint farms and mucky lanes,
into the big sky above
hanging like a blue lantern.
Cornflower blue, oh cornflower blue.
Yes, it was cornflower blue.
(This poem is in memory of my sister, Elizabeth, who died on 3 August 1987 from a haemorrhage caused by a brain tumour. She was just short of 30 years old. Coincidentally, Kate Wolf - the wonderful San Franciscan folk singer who sings Cornflower Blue on one of her albums - died a year earlier from leukemia at the age of 44. I have never written a poem before about my sister, or her death, but for some reason I awoke this morning with most of this poem already half-formed in my head.)
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