Nirala Books: FROM SOS : Surviving Suicide : British Poet Christopher Southgate's "Sestina"

CHRISTOPHER SOUTHGATE

Sestina

for Karen and Ros and Sue, Richard and Peter and Simon,

and many others

I came here when I was nineteen, to get well

from a kind of flash-flood of down, from a tyrant rule

of spiders over the thin moon of me. Safe from harm

here, they said. The film’ll run slowly. Under control.

No-one will have to know. No-one will notice.

They didn’t say I’d come out with a label.

Mind you, it was a kind of comfort, the label,

at first. People could see I’d fallen down a well

that was real. It made them take notice.

Then we lost our insurance. It’s a rule,

the girl on the phone said. So I lost control

and broke the phone. My friend left. Only then the self-harm

and the Seclusion Room. What’s the harm,

I said, if I cut myself? Is that the wrong label?

They tried things out till I was under control:

Thirty milligrams the spiders. Seventy milligrams, well,

Numbness, like living yesterday over. Fifty mgs rule

O.K. Not disruptive enough to notice.

I watch the trees a lot. I stand by the notice

That says all visitors must sign in and out. Harm-

less words. I tell another patient it’s a good rule.

He tells me I’m a police spy. I like that label.

Whoever made my loneliness made it well.

But who was it? And is he still in control?

Sometimes I stand and think - this is a sick plan to control

a special person who’s been fighting stuff a long time. ‘Notice

the difference, when you treat me right!’ I shout. Does no harm.

It is better here, than years ago. Same label -

but they ask about the colour of the bricks in your well.

Sometimes they help you choose to go ahead and keep a rule.

Maybe it has to be that certain drugs rule

your life, that without them there’s just no control

over the downs. But staff do talk to you, go past the label,

if you get the right one, with some time to notice

you. To see you’re choosing between living and no more harm

ever again. I read once that all shall be well -

tell me then: if I knew every rule, and could get people to notice

me, and was under control with the drugs, and was no harm

to anyone, and lost my label, would I be called well?

Commissioned by the local NHS Trust to express the concerns of long-term sufferers of mental illness, and read in the Service held in Exeter Cathedral to mark 50 years of the NHS in Devon.

Christopher Southgate trained originally as a biochemist, and has since been a house-husband, a bookseller, a lay chaplain in university and mental health settings, and a teacher of theology. He has published four collections on poetry with Shoestring Press, the most recent being Chasing the Raven (2016). In 1997 he wrote an exploration of the life of T.S. Eliot through an extended biographical poem with companion essays, published as A Love and its Sounding (Salzburg). In 2017 Canterbury Press brought out an edition of Southgate’s spiritual poems entitled, Rain falling by the River. His theological work includes The Groaning of Creation, which has proved to be a seminal study of the problem of suffering in evolution. Chris lives on the edge of Dartmoor, Devon, and he continues to be deeply influenced by this landscape, as well as by the journey of his Christian faith.

SOS: Surviving Suicide: A Collection of Poems that may Save a Life

Edited by Dean Stalham

ISBN: 978-81-951915-1-2 Pages 159 Demy

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