Meningococcal Septicaemia slipped into our family life
One dark December night. He'd be thirty-three now,
If he'd lived, my son.
And meningitis more or less destroyed
Everything for us.
It is true that grief can last a whole lifetime.
Like after a scorched earth policy
It can  take decades for lthe land to recover
But we had our three girls
And had to make a Christmas for them.
Somehow.
Whilst we tortured ourselves with 'What ifs'
It's the hours, minutes, seconds, that matter
The GP was too late injecting the penicillin
Into his tiny, fractured over-heating body.
And so on the blackest of nights
we kissed him  goodbye and I carried him
to the mortuary.
All the time thinking of Mid-Term Break,
The Seamus Heaney poem about his dead brother
the coffin "a foot for every year."
But Kieran was only weeks
And there would be no years.