The heatwave poem

And then there was the year we took a gîte near Bergerac, in the Dordogne region, taking our eldest son and his then girlfriend with us. The temperature was around 40 C, and we were in a car with plastic seats. It was, to say the least, uncomfortable. At some point, quite early on as I recall, our son and his girlfriend decided to cut short their stay with us and travel to her parents' place in Germany. We drove them to the station in Perigeux. It felt like a door had closed.

The poem was first published in Seven Senses (Diehard, 2000). 

Red

Only movement cooled,
driving round each curving canyon lip
towards Rocamadour.

We parked on a hairpin loop
for a comfort stop behind bushes,
and here the heat hit in slow gusts;
awesome heat bounced from red cliffs
to black road,
and up to faces
already embarrassed by the sun.
S. couldn’t go, afraid of creepie-crawlies
creeping.

In the town, J. bought a hat
with a silly flower - all the shop had -
and all the time
Moorish heat, hell-hot,
dessicated lungs,
plundered our will.
In the street’s shade
hot dark air led us to the Black Virgin,
a sooty little gnome in a hot grotto.

At Padirac, our roasting queue shuffled forward
before descending the Gouffre’s cool throat
opening to a cavernous cathedral,
out-doming any human shrine.

Afterwards, every cave, each mango sorbet,
any church or roofed bastide was welcome,
until Perigeux,
where we knew, at last,
we’d lost our son to someone else.

Heat-blind, heat-dumb, heat-deadened,
eyes full of dried tears,
we couldn’t watch their train depart.
We trudged from nave to altar,
unblessed, and too hot to touch.



Copyright © Colin Will 2000