standing at the front gate of our house
watching me as I skipped a few doors down.
It was lunchtime.
I guessed she wanted me to come inside
though she never spoke
just watched
with her expression calm and her lips straight
and her rounded belly
in a black zip-up jumper.
I skipped towards her. She turned
to go inside. In the hallway her black jumper
slung on the banister.
I called out,
finding her eventually in the back yard
lugging timber with my father
and wiping her brow.
I asked why she’d come out.
She gave me a look.
Go and play, will you?
So I went back outside in a slight daze
which stuck around
for a good twenty-five years
though I think now I get that this is what
a mother becomes sooner or later –
an entity inhabiting my language
my shade of lipstick
and the way I have suddenly started
to eat foods well past their best-before
and when I see my daughter fingering out notes
on our piano and I make yet another to-do list
I realise
my mother has possessed us both
despite sitting here quite corporeally
trying to read poetry.
To a Zoopraxiscope
Two hours
A halo of white down (its provenance has us thrown),
her pearlish face a thrift of flesh-pleats, skin sheened gold
as the liver orchestrates production and flow
of new blood. I do not hold her but gather her
many loose and still parts, puppetry of new motherhood.
How the angles of her remain womb-curved.
She is so small, so still, but like
a plane’s propeller appears the same whether stopped
or spinning, industry of survival
within the bones, brain, blood, forces beyond me
invoke her, again and again, to this foreign
place, chiming human notes
in her body’s clear bell.
Thirteen months
Some inner light comes on when she sees me,
her whole face a smile, she squirms out of whoever’s
arms hold her to patter drunkenly
across the room to me. I scoop her up,
kiss where gosling floss flicks
from the velvet arc of her nape. I have held her
like this a thousand times and yet
I am still pressed to find language
and music to express her, for she is a poem,
all matronly arms, cherubic thighs
with their bread-like bends, bright galaxies
of her personality. Daily she garlands me in moments
I want to press, etch, clutch forever.
She is a wish, then, whispered and let go,
racing for the open stair.
Six years
Tall for her age, she has lost two teeth,
is willing a third to topple.
Her skin flesh-porcelain, salted with freckles.
Hold my old school photograph next to hers
and you’d think we were twins, down to the
ancestral blue of her eyes, the muscle
of caramel hair by her waist.
I plait it, she tells me she’d like an old-style
typewriter for her birthday next month.
Her next book is all planned out.
Can I buy her tomatoes today,
can we bake a cake later, can she have
a spooky theme for her next birthday party?
My diary is fat with her schedule,
my abdomen rivered with scars from her,
my head heavy from waking
to soothe her in the night, strip her sheets.
Yet I count these as gifts.
Each day she drifts deeper
into the belly of the world, my memories of her
infancy flickering, shadows in a zoopraxiscope.
Her memories of childhood are just beginning
to sketch her womanhood. The dark
already lengthening behind each chiming wish.
What Matters
She was three, the beach was packed,
she was right there one minute and then
she was gone.
I pleaded with people,
described her,
we scanned the glass sea,
shouted across the parasols, her sister
each second felt like it was bleeding from me,
I flailed in unknowing –
this child about whom I knew everything,
how she had to be held to fall asleep,
how she loved to hide in cupboards, her fondness for horses,
I knew everything
except where she was.
I prayed angrily, fearfully,
I was at a cosmological juncture,
all matter had atomized to this one truth:
if we did not find her how could I live?
For ten infinite minutes
she was either drowned or stolen
until a coastguard ambled across the lashed white sands
with her at his side, unperturbed
in her pink polka dot vest,
her fine brown hair in a plait.
I started to cry, we took her
and clasped her between us
like a seam.
For days afterwards
I found myself staring at her, and when she climbed
into our bed at night I held her tight,
I did not fuss when she wouldn’t eat her veg,
I was OK when she wouldn’t go to bed.
And when I feel I have failed, failed utterly,
when I open a bill I cannot pay,
when the choirs of my worry commence
their dark concert
I see myself on that beach
still calling her name,
still calling her name.
Children of the Bullied
They are well warned.
First day of school:
hold yourself like this,
yes, shoulders square.
They know what ‘confident’
and ‘assertive’ mean
long before the others.
Taught to negotiate
friendship’s fickle maze,
their chums varied, many.
Sometimes you can spy them
rolling their eyes, wincing
at a kiss from their anxious
parents, to whom they are
so brave, so unlike them
entering that battlefield.
Sleep Training
Months after the glass crashed
to the floor – after I’d swept,
vacuumed, got down on all fours
and kissed sticky tape to the
unseen shards – a single
sliver suspended in lesser light.
Years on, often at night, the sight of her
small searching hand
through the stair gate
at her door, the sound of her cries
fresh as tree-clung fruit,
sharp as just-dropped glass.
Instrument
We took you to the beach
scooped a paper tray of sand,
lowered a magnet towards
the bed of it – blips bloomed fast
on the magnet’s lip
rose and pewter burr of metallic crumbs that nested,
unseen, amongst the silt,
the way motherhood
has drawn out my failings, fished out my flaws.
Sometimes I hold these to your light,
imagine the stubble
of them gathered
and forged by love’s flame to stronger metal,
a yet more useful tool.
Planet
It is the tragedy of childhood
that they do not know how much I love them –
my shining boy with his four-year-old need to make me proud,
my baby girl – plumpness, sunshine, all quest and zest,
my two year old – soft warm ivy around me at midnight,
a garden of language blooming daily in her mouth,
and my eldest – beautiful dance of sand and light, mirror
drinking all of me in and throwing all of me back.
They hear it daily, I love you, I love you,
they know my heart
has grown ears and eyes for them,
has its own arms
to carry their hurts,
would walk out of my own flesh for them.
But their knowledge is wanting.
They have yet to find measure for this love, genus, potestas,
though they move in it, though it stretches over and under them
like a planet they tread upon, breathing its air,
sleeping through all its watchful nights.
Honour Thy Parents
Honour thy father and thy mother
for they have spent the waning flame
of their youth failing
to get you to sleep; long hours by your bed,
singing, pleading. It was not
what they imagined parenthood would be like.
Honour them
for they have had to figure you out
like a trillion-piece jigsaw
that changed each time
they spied the beginnings of a picture.
Honour them for sparing you,
for fumbling and fretting, dressing and undressing
the foreign shrieking creature you once were
lest you grew too cold, too hot,
these imperfect beings
who confronted their complete dearth of knowledge
at first sight of you,
new and unbearably slight,
they resolved henceforth to do everything
right – honour them
for enduring vagaries and catalogues of advice,
most of it wrong,
for swallowing judgments dealt by strangers
during your many epic meltdowns.
No doubt there were times
you pushed them to some barren edge of love,
embarrassments, harassments of other
children in the park, or when you called them names
in public – fool! Dirty poo-face!
O honour them!
who carried their dreams through your childhood
like beads in a ripped sack,
they were doing their best; understand they were
their own parents’ children – honour them
for they must live with their mistakes,
honour them, which is to say
be all that they were not and do all
they could not, and so honour
your life. And if you find
you can neither forgive nor see in them
the good, the God, or the once unblemished child
think on this –
parenthood is the universal curse
of becoming or overcoming
our parents
for better or for worse –
and honour them.
My Father’s Mother
When I think of her I see smoke
looping from the ashtray
like a silver-white spring giving up its bounce, I see
crime novels
piled by the bedside and although I was not there,
I see the scene she recounted to my mother in hushed tones
many weeks after the fact – my grandfather
pouring hot tea in her lap.
When I think of her I hear
the plaintive tune of that soap opera she clung to –
still, I cannot bear the sound – I hear
the premature rasp in her voice and the yap
of that infernal dog and most of all I hear
silence, canyons in the things she said
like the night my mother brought me, an infant,
to her house after my father beat her
and my grandmother said, yes she said it –
in my day when you made your bed you lay in it.
I can tell you there is none of the woman I knew
in that statement, there is
bitterness and echoes
of what she must have been told
in her youth
you make your bed, you lie in it –
a hinge, a tidal force, a false gravity
that made her marry him, forgive him, endure him,
even when he lifted the hot cup and poured it,
poured it all
in my grandmother’s lap.
Puppy
There was this childhood that thought it was a puppy.
It followed me around everywhere, whimpering
and begging to be fed.
It was a puppy, yes, but a terribly ugly puppy.
It was riddled with all sorts of repulsive diseases.
The vet said the diseases were treatable. I said
I was sick of it hanging around. I’d lost friends and lovers
because of it. Made all sorts of wrong career moves
and impulse buys. I didn’t mention the nightmares.
She told me I had two options.
One was an injection from which the puppy wouldn’t wake.
The other was a kennel where, perhaps in time, someone else
would take pity on it, take it home, groom it up into
a fine dog.
This childhood that thought it was a puppy
howled as I walked from the iron bars. I didn’t look back.
Sometimes still I wake to find drool on my face and paw prints
up and down my bed.
Breaking My Father
I would be hard pushed to recall the details
of last week or even the events of yesterday
but I can tell you that I was five years old
and it was seven o’clock on a Thursday evening
when I broke my father.
My mother was out,
we were alone and it was given that each week
on this day I was allowed to stay up
an extra half hour to watch Top of the Pops –
but he decided that this should not be so, I should
go to bed, and maybe I was not yet thickened
in the smear of battery or too young to cow
to his threats but either way I refused, I clenched
my fists and yelled for my life as he dragged me
upstairs and when we reached my bedroom I would not
go in, no I would not do as he said.
Suddenly he dropped
to his knees before me, his face a broken window
and I see him, I still see him reach out blindly,
penitent, as though greeting the longed-for dead, pulling
me to him and holding me tight, both of us
toppling to the ground as if bound by rope
and him sobbing and sobbing. I remember thinking
that I was too hot and couldn’t breathe,
but he just held on tight
saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
There is no other time
in my life that he did this, this act of extravagant
penance, submitting, revealing tenderness.
And perhaps this was the difference between us,
the reason he passed on the dark cup of abuse
and I did not – my father had never witnessed the splinter
in his assaulter’s mask, a break in the fire
to tell him there was something human there,
that there w
as merely a man behind all that hatred,
all that fear, just a man, a man full of need
to be broken by a child.
Still Life, With Family
A pear of candlelight
wagging on the mantelpiece,
the baby chewing the chewable end of a watergun,
drips from our son’s last water fight
mouthing rain’s sibilations.
You trying to fix my computer,
surfacing every now and then
with considered diagnoses,
our other daughters eating pancakes,
a nothingness on the TV. No one is shouting,
no thundercloud of cigarette smoke,
no threat of anyone bleeding
or being bruised. No one will take their life
in their daughter’s bed.
Belfast Murmuration
No healing without grace
No healing without first being broken
the way one bird shatters into thousands
starlings
black seeds
thrown up from Victoria Bridge
against a purpling sky
It could be chaos
instead the bird-turned-thousand
coils
twizzles
mosaics
then heals together
in waves,
net gathering
pieces of sky
or a flung rug of bird
deciding what else it could be –
a tunnel
a tree, accelerated
a continent
or perhaps a word
All the alternatives to brokenness
offered by grace
The Fourth Child
Let me tell you about the fourth child.
To some the fourth child is a curiosity
akin to Indonesian hobbits
a diamond exoplanet
or deep sea crabs going about their business
in seven-hundred-degree waters.The fourth child
is somewhat hard to accept, like a sudden proof of God
or the invention of an eighth day
an appendage that unbalances how the universe appears to sway
and thus the fourth child begs a reasonable explanation
which crosses all levels of socio-economic and metaphysical
sense – conceived straight after Armageddon
was declared on the ten o’clock news, or,
umbrella for all sins: a mistake.
This is despite the fact that twenty-odd years ago
a four-kid-family was neither blinked at nor considered
any more outlandish than eight people in a car
designed for five. Perhaps it is for these reasons that