A Daughter, A Mother

So it is Mother’s Day here in the UK.  My mother has been dead for almost six years. She didn’t quite make the full one hundred but had, as they say, a decent innings. Her final year of life was very affected by Covid and the many restrictions it placed on visits and activities to keep her engaged. She suffered from Alzheimers but knew us right up to the end. I wrote this poem not long after she died in December 2020. I hadn’t realised there wouldn’t be another, more normal Mother’s Day for us to celebrate. Her care home had gone into lockdown before Boris (the bastard) Johnson put us all into lockdown; they were sensible like that. I recall the care home manager telling me that Mutti, in her bluff Yorkshire way, had noticed the care nurses in PPE and wanted to know if they were in fancy dress!

Anyway, this poem is me as daughter, the next will be about being a mother. Hope you like them.

Our Final Mother’s Day ( 2020)

I bring my thank offering:

six- pack of a fine German lager,

card expressing appropriate sentiment,

you like ‘a good verse’ and despite your

dimming faculties, can still read.

I place these items in the vestibule,

that airlock, shielding you and

all the others from the world outside;

I cannot enter,

cannot be the one to bring contagion

to this nursery of ancients.

Later a nurse passes you her phone

so we can try a video call;

my tiny image on the screen bewilders you.

You turn your head away, look at the nurse

then ask the usual question,

Is she coming now to take me home?

We are lucky to live in Dorset. Thorncombe Woods (where Thomas Hardy’s childhood home is located) is very close to where I live and was a popular outing with our sons when they were small. They had particular locations and activities they enjoyed, all rather idiosyncratic but very joyful. I don’t think the poem needs any more context than the fact that it is a memory of a time in my life and theirs. Being their mother is better than anything else I could ever imagine. Happy Mother’s Day.

A Communion With Nature

To the woods, they say, these sons of mine,

aged nine and seven.

We have been before, once

even at night to walk in darkness

with only the moon and the thrill of

our beating hearts for company.

Sometimes I am tempted to give them a

breadcrumb trail, but I think they know

the way home though if it should happen

that they did not and got distracted,

birds might eat the bread.

My heart…my heart at the thought of it.

The pits, they shout and set off running.

It is a ritual they have, communing not so much

with nature as with the spirits of young men

who scrambled up steep sided trenches into war.

They race each other up the slopes,

I scramble and they haul me up the final yards.

Oh, the wild laughter.

My heart…my heart  at the sound of it.

The thread of molecules between us

pulls me after their young legs, the beauty of

knees marked by dirt and algae.

There is a fallen beech tree,

a swallet hole casualty.

The earth between its roots is useful

weaponry, clumps hard as metal;

it is for these they have come.

Chalk and clay grenades are flung

at tree trunk targets, or at the boulder

we are always surprised to find there,

standing sentinel between the heathland

and the wood.

The plosive sound of shattering earth

as the mark is hit matched by the huff and

whoop of their delight. They dance.

The wild laughter.

My heart…my heart at the sight of it.