Fire

Typhoid – Sydney 1903

Sometimes it was unbearable to see her like that,

Drowning in her own sweat, her forehead ablaze

I tried to be brave, and held her hand tightly whispering

“It’ll be alright,” I was a bad liar

“Bryton ...” she’s always murmur back weakily

I knew she was dead when her hand went

cold in mine.

Its never been the same after the death of my mother, although life is still filled with love from sibling, we are struggling,

Everyday is life or death.

My older sister now leads, sacrificing everything for my younger sister’s education

I was deprived of such luxury, education

Instead working in a shoe factory in Newtown

The smell of leather filling my nostrils, sweat and blood

And the reward? A few shillings

I saw the horses everyday

As I walked to the factory they were there

Crowding the already filthy streets

Creating a furry blanket of animals

But amongst the scum the poverty and death

I always saw a glimmer of colour, red, blue, yellow

They filled my heart with a hope, that someday my life would be a magnitude of colours instead of this erebus.

It was an ongoing drag, this past year

Work, eat (very little), work

But I had to, My younger sister was the only glimmer of colour in our family

Without her, everything, all that we have done would be for nothing

A plethora of question burden my mind,

An inferno that never dies

Why did she have to leave this world ?

Why do I have to work so hard?

Who had the right to steal my childhood?

No games, no playing nothing that hinted of a childhood

Stress clouds my happiness

My hands have forgotten how to hold pens

Only the cold scent of leather, filled my life

Sometimes I wish to fade into memory

A memory of mother or school

I remember learning, I remember my friends

But I remember one lesson only

The lesson of what killed my mother

The disease that took her life from her

The thing that destroyed our family

Typhoid Fever

One day, after work

I felt the heat consume by body

A familiar heat, that reeked of death

It contaminated me, a poison

I knew then that i would leave this chaos

This void between the ground and the sky

I began to lose my eyesightMy brain spun madly like it was possessed Thinking things i couldn’t control It felt like the damned heat was Eating at my heart, with every faint beat I was dying. And then it stopped, the perpetual beat

defeated by the same thing that had killed my mother.

TYPHOID.