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Maggie Sullivan
Lexicon
When you asked
how I felt
about the past
all I could say
was I'm okay.
Are you okay?
You nodded
but I knew you needed a larger explanation
for the lexicon of suicide we inherited –
how, every day, we look up mum
and still find her under dead by her own hand,
an error on the part of the dictionary
I'm sure,
easily done
with around forty words to a page,
one thousand three hundred and ninety seven
pages, plus introduction,
thirty five million words on the web version
when it's finished, so the fly leaf says
and thesaurus
but that's been no help either
these forty years.
Take my hand:
Okay is a triumph
considering.
Maggie Sullivan is a mentor for Survivor's Poetry and a Trustee of the
Poetry Society. Her first collection: Near Death (Domestic) was
published in October 2007 and is available from
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