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    Sleep, Sparrow, Sleep
    Sleep, Sparrow, Sleep
    Sleep, Sparrow, Sleep
    Ebook74 pages55 minutes

    Sleep, Sparrow, Sleep

    By Grant J Venables

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Watching my ma crumple into the absurd vortex that is dementia, meant I spent a lot of time sitting by her bed as she-often drug induced--dreamt and jolted in and out of consciousness. As an expat Canadian, I was only able to see my old girl during the December and June breaks from the school where I work. So I was weighted by a strange guilt (of course beyond my control) and I was also afforded these intense six-month snapshots of Ma as she slid further and further towards her painful death. Always trying to make sense out of our absurd existence, Ma gave me much to think about. Existentialism, Absurdity, Euthanasia--words Ma would never have used while fully functioning, were words she brought to life through her lingering death. This small book is my attempt to honor what was her death and to make some sense of her disease.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGrant J Venables
    Release dateMar 27, 2014
    ISBN9781310444517
    Sleep, Sparrow, Sleep
    Author

    Grant J Venables

    I am a Canadian who lives and writes in Southeast Asia. Presently I work in Kuala Lumpur, teaching English Literature. I was born and raised in and around Shuswap Lake in south-central British Columbia, but I have also lived in northern Alberta. I went to school at Grande Prairie Regional College, then I moved to Edmonton Alberta, and attended the University of Alberta. From there I moved to Bangkok, Thailand and furthered my studies with Michigan State University. I am married to a wonderful woman, Kaeo (who is on the cover of Bangkok—Just Under the Skin). I have three sons, Kritsana, Heathcliff-Manx, and Keats J. We keep a small farm in Thailand where we raise organic fruit and produce, and ducks...a great number of ducks.When not reading, writing, or teaching, I spend time with my family, my friends, my ducks, and my trees. Trees provide a certain sanity and calm in a world so often too concerned with the insane rush to destroy itself.

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      Book preview

      Sleep, Sparrow, Sleep - Grant J Venables

      Sleep, Sparrow, Sleep

      Grant J. Venables

      Published by

      Grant J. Venables

      at Smashwords

      ISBN: 9781310444517

      Copyright 2014 Grant J. Venables

      Also available at Smashwords by Grant J. Venables Venables:

      the meaning

      BOLD (poetry)

      A Sense of Place (poetry)

      Bangkok—Just Under the Skin

      A Few Lines on…

      Thank you for downloading this e-book. This e-book remains the copyrighted property of the author and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords, e-books, Grant J. Venables. where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

      Table of Contents

      Wilma’s Epigraph

      The Works

      Appendix 1

      Footnotes

      The Author

      Notes and Thanks

      Sleep, Sparrow, Sleep

      Way up high in your tree

      Tucked in under the wing of your mother

      For it isn’t yet day

      And it’s warm where you stay

      With that feathery quilt for a cover

      Fly, Sparrow, Fly

      To all compass rose points

      See what the world has to discover

      For too soon you’ll be wed

      And then chained to that bed

      Held a prisoner, a wife, and a mother

      Weep, Sparrow, Weep

      For the love you’ll not know

      For the time you’ll not spend with another

      For your destiny’s set

      Full of doubt and regret

      Sacrifice is your burden, my mother

      Sleep, Sparrow, Sleep

      For you’re too old to fly

      You’re alone; there’s no time for another

      It is now time to die

      Close your eyes, do not cry

      All your pain will soon end my sweet mother

      I

      Watched the sparrows in the new Bangkok international terminal, forever trapped inside but, in their way, free in this massive atrium. They were caught mid-construction, now forever in-house, forever taken care of: kept birds until death.

      ***

      Found a place to plug in and amused myself with soft porn and hardball, once waiting in transit in Hong Kong. Baseball and fake tits: what else was there for me on the way to see my dying mother? Baseball and fake tits. The sparrows were trapped here too: baseball, big tits, sparrows, then the big ride to the old rock of Canada.

      ***

      Vancouver was a sun-filled blur. Two .5 mg Xanax¹ on the 14 hours of airplane assured my rest and the resulting Zen as I sat for two hours more at the Vancouver Greyhound depot waiting for my ride and watching the people come and go speaking of…. I don’t rent cars. I don’t own plastic. I like the non-speed of the bus—that big steel box—like watching a panorama of Canada roll slowly by my window, like reacquainting myself with this old girl at a bus’s snail-pace (the old girl here being Canada, not my dying Ma, although both are caught in the same slow cycle).

      The Greyhound was its usual mix of bus people. The coach was only half-full, so we all had room for our humanities; the collective breathed easy. Outside Chilliwack I awoke from half-drugged slumber (remnants in the system still remained) to find that great snow peak that always shocks me as it appears from nowhere: its majestic, white-capped power; its mass; its silence. Usually as I pass this beauty-bound rock, I crane my neck to hold on to it, keep it as long as possible. This year I didn’t twist and desperately grasp. I watched it out the window and let it—so full of natural grace and profound inanimate dignity—pass silently. I appreciated it fully while there, then let it glide past and be gone.

      Pulled into Kamloops near midnight. Kept a lookout for Merritt but lost it somewhere in the starry, starry night. A silver slipper of a moon hung high over that desolate cattle range. The mountain-lake country over Kamloops is beautiful, especially under this bright squint of a slivered moon.

      Had a cup of tea, silently, with a lonely looking lady at the Kamloops bus café. She looked of stories, but told none. We supped in silence and understood the Canadian paradox of shared solitudes.

      Stayed awake from there to Salmon City and soaked up all that night beauty. Some childish excitement about this old town still haunts me, can’t shake it: like a shadow, like making love, again, to an old girlfriend whose body you can never forget. By the skinny moon I watched the lake where I changed from boy to man. My lake, in this deep black of morning, is a vastness of blind wonder, a smooth desert

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