Searching For Prof Mayosi's Murmur : How Loss Makes Everything Disappear By Linda Masilela

I left my breath
Inside someone else’s lungs.
I am unlearning how to breathe.
I gasp, gently
A whimper escapes my nostrils
I whisper for help
But no one is listening
(This is a lesson on Loss)
.
Loss is when air escapes
Your lungs because your body is a wildfire.
It is the wind that tugs itself
Underneath your trachea
It never stays.
.
Loss is an ICU bed
An empty oxygen tank
A heart with no beat
Cold hands
Pulseless
Pupils fixed and dilated
It’s funeral songs
It’s gone too soon
“He was too young”
“She had a whole future ahead of her”
Loss is depression, Burn Out, loneliness, despair
Fickle like memories.
Unseen but felt, like the wind.
Its music.
But on broken speaker
Yet the memory of the sound is what we dance to.
.
I wonder if Prof Mayosi
Knew what loss is.
How the spine
Can bend towards the horizon
How mountains never meet
Yet fistfuls of oceans
Are entombed underneath our tongues.
I wonder if Prof Mayosi’s heart
Was pulled at the seams
And the strings detached
On the 28/07/2018.
I wonder if he knew that
Loss is not a morning breeze
It is 2 am when the patient refuses to wake up
And you have to write a long note why you couldn’t save him.
I wonder if he knew that Doctor’s too, need saving
And that a boat can burn
Whilst surrounded by water
That droughts can happen during rainfall
And healers can’t heal themselves.
.
Loss is absence
It’s those coffins we swallow whenever they call us essential workers
What’s essential about carrying graveyards on your back?
About burn out?
I wonder if Prof Mayosi knew what loss is.