This is one of my favourite contemporary poems.

I met David Wright many years ago, in the Lake District, at a conference of the Society of Medical Writers (he’s a doctor).
The Society had held a competition, and David was a prize winner – I think not for this particular poem, though it’s so good that it would have stood out in any competition.

I’ve read ‘Returning’ many times, and it never fails to give me a sense of serenity. David knows what he’s talking about, and he finds a perfect (and unexpected) way to express it. The poem has a free form, yet it also has a natural rhythm which perfectly suits the breath and heartbeat mentioned in the poem.

It seemed to me that the poem might please many readers, and also comfort many, if – as seems natural – they sometimes worry about dying. So here it is, with many thanks to David for kindly allowing me to post it. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do.

RETURNING

Yes, I have seen death – many times:
on curtained wards and in attic
bedrooms, to the roll of trolleys
across linoed floors and to the soft
tap of branches on thin windows.

And every time, the question:
why so different, this pause
between one beat and the next that
is not a pause? After all, the heart
hangs a thousand times each day.

But now that, for you, death
is near, no longer waiting for a
distant date, but prowls instead
the diary in your jacket pocket,
you ask a different question.

I can reassure you. There is no
pain, no distress, no hungriness
for breath. Yes, I have seen these
things of course, many times,
but they are birth, not death.

Birth is the struggle, birth that flings
us into harshness, light and noise;
death is an easing, a sigh, a setting free,
it is the waves’ foam streaming through
the sand returning to the sea.

– David J. Wright