This book is in memory of my mother Emma, and explores her world when she had Alzheimer’s disease. Some years before she had written a poem from which the book gets its title. The book uses symbolic imagery, taken from her nursing home gardens, complex folding and doorways through, which act as a maze.
The birds don’t know it’s Sunday.
The bullfinch as bright as Chinese wallpaper
jerks its way up the crimson dog-wood stem.
Two blackbirds plunder scarlet berries from the winter tree.
A rook passes silently overhead
Their days are measured by dark mornings,
early nights. The sun tells their lives and seasons
as the earth tilts from autumn to winter,
warmth to cold, abundance to austerity.
The days on their calendar have no names.
Emma Dodd
1992
