By: Matthew Pullar
Matthew Pullar is a poet and teacher based in Melbourne, Australia. He has been published in Amethyst Review, Ekstasis, Fare Forward and Heart of Flesh. His latest collection of poems, "This Teeming Mess of Glory", was published by Wipf & Stock in 2025.
After Philip Larkin.
Yes, each generation gifts its scars to the next,
like the way my grandfather's silence cast its own silence on his children
when his fourth child died,
aged six,
under anaesthetic.
His silence after the inquest,
which found my little uncle's heart had been weakened
by measles.
Not as feared,
as assumed-
that some hidden allergy to anaesthetic snatched him in his sleep,
like my Gran believed for the rest of her life,
so dreading every other time her children went under the knife.
Which was often.
And my mother too,
inheriting the silence of her mother-in-law's grief.
And me.
Even after knowledge, grief sits
silent, latent inside our cells.
When my eldest went under to take out
a splinter, and the surgeon asked,
"Any family history with anaesthetics?",
I caught the scar in my throat.
Faultered, before a fragile, "No".
And when I asked,
only weeks ago, how my granddad had coped,
five children at home, Gran in hospital
with a newborn, my dad -
who had been the newborn - said,
"He had a breakdown".
So many scars hidden in the generations of silence.
Passed down with the genes that determine
which of my parent's diseases I bequeath.
My crowded teeth.
My glasses.
My father's baldness,
predisposed in my architecture,
activated by my anxious hair-wringing youth.
The cycle cannot be broken,
save by Promethean feats of science that threaten more than they deliver.
But silence is the genetic curse that festers.
We speak to utter different verses.
Utter change.
