Most poems about mortality dwell on the end. Michael John Pickering's "Anyway, This Is Certain" is more interested in the turn, the moment when a life stops moving in one direction and starts to look the other way. In a handful of short lines it moves from private fear to something close to acceptance, and the whole shift happens in the last two words of its final sentence.
The poem opens with an image of reversal: "I have seen my life / blowing backward / like Utamaro's wave / to the turning point." The comparison is a strange one. Utamaro is, as far as I know, best remembered as a printmaker of portraits of women, and the Japanese wave most people picture belongs to Hokusai. Whatever the reason for the choice, the effect is of a wave curling back on itself at its crest, the instant before it breaks or falls away. That crest is the "turning point," and the speaker is standing on it, seeing his life run backward like film. The verb "blowing" gives the wave wind and motion, so the review of a life feels less like calm reflection than like something happening to him. The artist's name also gives the stanza a delicate, deliberate beauty that contrasts with what comes next.
Next the poem states its idea in two tight lines: "from living to dying / from dying to living." The repetition is a chiasmus, a crossed pattern, and it makes the sentence loop. Death is not placed at the end of a line but in the middle of a circle. The lines have no commas, so the thought runs on, and then the first full stop arrives with "living." The speaker "stop[s] and glance[s]," and the line is short enough that the reader stops with him.
The glance is physical: "from navel / to organs of generation / and back." The navel is the scar of being born, the first proof that we were attached to someone. The "organs of generation" are the means by which we pass life on. The clinical, Latinate phrase is a bold choice. Where a more romantic poem might say "love" or "desire," Pickering uses the vocabulary of a biology textbook, so the cycle of birth and renewal feels factual and unadorned. The body becomes a small map of the larger circle, and "and back" echoes the earlier "backward," so the movement of the wave is now happening inside the speaker's own anatomy.
Then the scale widens abruptly: "And from the sea / to the landscape of the world." The wave becomes the whole ocean, and the ocean gives way to land. The poem has gone from image to body to world, and each step takes a larger view. Because the line breaks keep dropping the reader onto new ground, the sentence feels as if it is climbing a headland to see the view.
The ending carries the poem's weight: "the world I must leave and leaving // leave / to the children." The word "leave" appears three times, in two senses. At first it means to depart, which is the certainty the title promises. Then, left alone on its own line, "leave" means to bequeath. The gap before it works like a held breath, and the pun turns the loss into a gift. Dying and giving become the same act. The final line, "to the children," is plain and short, and it answers the earlier "generation" by showing what the generating was for.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. Its lines run from two or three stresses down to a single word, and that irregularity suits a speaker who is thinking aloud and catching himself. The title also matters. "Anyway" is a casual, almost shrugging word, as if the speaker has been through every doubt and come out the other side. What he is left with is plain: he cannot keep the world, but he can hand it on. That modest, unsentimental consolation is what makes the poem worth reading.