She woke up old at last, alone,

bones in a bed, not a tooth

in her head, half dead, shuffled

and limped downstairs

in the rag of her nightdress,

smelling of pee.



            Slurped tea, stared

at her hand--twigs, stained gloves--

wheezed and coughed, pulled on

the coat that hung from a hook

on the door, lay on the sofa,

dozed, snored.



            She was History.

She'd seen them ease him down

from the Cross, his mother gasping

for breath, as though his death

was a difficult birth, the soldiers spitting,

spears in the earth;



            been there

when the fisherman swore he was back

from the dead; seen the basilicas rise

in Jerusalem, Constantinople, Sicily; watched

for a hundred years as the air of Rome

turned into stone;



            witnessed the wars,

the bloody crusades, knew them by date

and by name, Bannockburn, Passchendaele,

Babi Yar, Vietnam. She'd heard the last words

of the martyrs burnt at the stake, the murderers

hung by the neck,



            seen up-close

how the saint whistled and spat in the flames,

how the dictator strutting and stuttering film

blew out his brains, how the children waved 

their little hands from the trains. She woke again,

cold, in the dark,



            in the empty house.

Bricks through the window now, thieves

in the night. When they rang on her bell

there was nobody there; fresh graffiti sprayed

on her door, shit wrapped in a newspaper posted

onto the floor.