Fern Smith | Artist / Storyteller

TRANSITION

Death’s door has for me always been ajar. I was born from a mother who knew she was dying. She died when I was six, pick up sticks. Since then I have pondered death. Death walks with me.

love’s argue
hugging and wrenching
drawing and pulling
sighing and groaning
scheming and screaming
dripping entwined

Death has come close, breathing down my neck through reckless abandon of youth, fast cars and illnesses. Loved ones sharing death’s rattle and it leaving. I have smelt death in the living. Death is noisy.

breath in
breath out
soft nose hairs bending
muscles releasing
muscles contracting
noisy stillness
descending
smell death’s odour
thick sweet pungent

Picked up by my bootstraps I assembled my ramshackle life’s belief. I am of the new generation of non-believers born on the skirt of bell-bottoms. I became slogans of the new world. I am anti-violence, yet I don’t know peace. I am love, yet angry. I tossed out religion, yet lost. I am pro-choice, yet I don’t know freedom. I am a tree hugger that drives a car. Did I throw out death?

work hard
beyond fatigue
water leaves me
skirts brow
wind sweeps
cooling
bend and bow

There is merit in the proposition of reincarnation. We are dying and being born continuously. Death is compost, started the day I was born. I am shedding parts of myself continuously; skin, water, bone, gases, oil and salts. I leave death behind all the time—a footprint, a marker, DNA. We are something and we are nothing all at the same time.

sleeps silent shedding flake
flutters and floundering to the ground
swallowed up by the vacuum cleaner
cast into the bin
parts of me
in landfill

What happens then to my conscious self when the body has its last breath I am concerned with. I was conscious as possible when I gave birth; no drugs, no doctors, out in the wilderness. I wanted to feel it all. I wanted feeling screaming. I would like to consciously step into death with feeling.

composting thoughts
compounding and confusing
twisting and wrenching
aching heart
sleepless nights wrest

The breath on the tip of the nose, the swelling of the chest, the absolute exertion you give to being alive. Death will slow my heart, close airs path. My body will rot. I will wend my way down a river, to be sucked up by tree roots, vaporised through the leaves giving birds an uplift to their flight. The waters left will form clouds, fall, land and new shoots will grow.

I will transition.

—Fern Smith (2023)

Editor’s note: Fern Smith is a specialist in digital art print and water colour on cotton with a passion to tell stories through drawing, painting and printing; conveying complex social change into pictures across media. For more information about Fern, you can visit her website at: fernartz.com

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