Poem: No Bridge

No Bridge

for Ruth Marion Dignam née Messmer, 1957–2024

There is no bridge over the river of loss,

you have to walk upstream until you find a place to cross –

it’s harder near the banks and the going’s slow

but further out though easier is longer much to go –

eventually you find a place to step this side to that,

or leap, maybe, or, more often, find you’re heading back

on the other side, and hadn’t noticed the transition,

had started to enjoy the view, though that admission

brings a wave of guilt and more tears –

hope and possibility struggle with the fears,

and though the path’s downhill now,

there’s still stuff in the way,

still you trip and fall, and still you pay.

I don’t know how you tell when you’ve reached the place

across from where you began,

it won’t look the same, the space,

it’s maybe up or down the stream a bit,

but you’ll know it by the sense of fit.

You’ve not arrived but at last you’re on a track,

the biggest chasm lies behind, there’s no going back.

Paul Dignam, living in Adelaide since 1986 was born in Sydney and spent his childhood years there. In a career in psychiatry spanning over four decades, he had especial focus on child and adolescent mental health, along with holding senior clinical, leadership and lecturing roles. Retired and widowed, with many children and grandchildren, his further interests are in drawing, writing and reading, rowing and walking, and psychotherapy supervision. More can be found about Paul here. With his first published piece being in the 2011 edition of the Jesuit journal Eureka Street, Paul has found ‘an increasing sense of poetry as emotional diary, for the last twenty years or so’.

Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to [email protected]. Submissions should be in the body of the email, not as attachments. A poetry book will be awarded to each accepted contributor.