when the fourth child is born she receives no gifts –
I swear it, not one –
for it is largely taken that her overly keen parents
are besieged by baby stuff and will be only too pleased
to dig out the mothballed basket and yellowing vests.
Her beauty is scored in comparison to her older siblings
and within an instant is ignored
as though she emerged in a tide of doppelgängers.
This is only how other people react
but to her mother the fourth child is an epiphany,
thorn in the side of St Patrick, plucked,
the face of God, unveiled,
a truth so grave as to be holy –
she could have four more babies and ten more after that
and, heaven help her, another dozen
and the fear that seized her
when she was pregnant for the second time –
that she might not feel quite what she felt for the first –
has long since vanished. This fourth child
could be her twentieth, her seventieth, her eighteen
thousand and sixteenth, and yet
the beleaguered, over-worked and too-shadowed heart
would still find a way to pick up its bags
sling them over its shoulder
and begin its hellacious and lonely expedition
to all the unexplored countries of love.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Motherhood
which reminds me that it didn’t happen
overnight but very gradually and subtly
my mind keened away from the catalogue
of thoughts which had sat in it snug as eggs
in a nest for almost thirty years to a shore
of thoughts about every possible topic
that involved babies and mothering
I found myself in deep earnest conversation
with nameless women in libraries and parks
and airport queues and at the supermarket
while searching for the cheapest baked beans,
we’d never share our names but we’d share
our experiences of teething and weaning and
being late for everything and sleep training
precisely because it was like free-hand climbing
the tallest red rock face in Utah the only human
for miles and randomly coming across another
similarly occupied hominid but then it was
more than that, it was a kind of baptism
in the middle of the Pacific
rolling up on a strange and
lonely and astoundingly beautiful island and
making new friends with the others
who staggered up the beach, their arms full
with this new life, and it was more than who
I made friends with and it was more than
the way my shopping trolley saw fewer
ready meals and more organic produce
and it was more than anything I can yet describe
but it began with my thoughts which keened
towards topics my former self would have labeled
‘boring’ but which now possessed me
and when I say I was thinking endlessly about
how exactly to prepare six bottles in one go
and whether she should be starting to sit up
by now and whether I should give in and let
him sleep in our bed or persist with the cot
I was not thinking about any of this at all
but feminism, about the government,
about Africa, about astronomy, about history,
about nature, creativity, about God.
Clay
Our children are so soft, we imprint them
like a heavy sole stepping into mud
not breaking the ground but reordering
its elements, the way it will hitherto
hold water, light, the curious nose of wind
and voice of earth. Even when later rain
smoothes out that patina something of the mark
holds. Even when the sun whips the wetness
to its pools of night and the stiffened ground
wears its shelled-out grooves, when these deepen
in each punching hail and hollowing storm
the pattern may be nothing like the original
print but art in its own way, no trace of boot
apparent in the striving clay.
In Joy I Have Asked Questions
after Carol Rumens
In joy I have asked questions
But in sorrow I asked more.
Is the point of pain to make us ask
Why we live, and what for?
One Hundred Years After the Suffragettes
Some days, a razing slowness.
Five o’clock want of unctuous roads.
Anxiety’s striations another kind of rain
down the lens: more redundancies.
A murmuration of interest rates.
My Plan B involves a house
built with mud and clay, off the grid,
some chickens. At playgroup the mothers
re-fashion their feminist principles.
Most of us are working two full-time jobs.
Some days, the kind of slowness
that sings our children’s growth
like time lapse films of mushrooms
flinging up their polka dot skirts:
a dress our daughter wore last summer
is suddenly too short. Our son writes
me a love note, boulevards of vowels
like skywriting.The baby’s illness unfists.
Some days the nettles and brambles
swoon just long enough for me
to reach both hands into that sweet river
and sup at what I am living for.
Life Questions
And life will ask, what have you made of me?
I will show my art, my children, the state of my soul.
And life will ask, how have you spent me?
I will account for the days of nothingness and those
of greatness,
and life will smile at my interpretation of nothingness
and greatness.
Life will say, how have you loved me?
And there will be measures of hatred amongst my love,
too many,
for it is often too simple to love.
Then, life will stretch out its wings and say, how have you
shared me? Gifted me?
It will seem I shared a single black tear
from the wealth of the watermelon.
Each moment life says
take this, and this, and this.
The Mire
These trenches are endured alone,
and at times so thick
with sucking mud and cloying fog,
so much enemy fire at one woman
that it seems there will be no end
and no happiness,
that somewhere along the line
you did not sign up for this,
are not made for this.
Perhaps the mire
is you being made
for this.
from the cloud fields
then wound and wound
to usefulness.
So the string inches
up the cello bridge,
never closer to breaking
when it sounds its
true note.
Weft
They call it ‘broodiness’, or ‘feeling broody’,
biological weft in the body’s rich cloth
designed as impetus to reproduce – but really
it’s more than that, stubborn as nostalgia, trough
in rationality, elemental metal forged in love
but made of – what? The gateway’s cl
osed,
my body will never clasp another pulse, will not glove
the root and stem of a reddening rose.
No more beginnings, no genesis in my ending,
no more will milk waken, like hope, to stab the skin,
yet it persists! Ghostly craving, devoted midwife
wanting all to flower – the woof and warp of life.
The Lessons
How to love that which does not give love
immediately, which does not smile much
nor laugh but which asks and asks
and takes more than you can give
Physical lessons, too – mastery
of contortion, how to achieve a night’s
sleep on the width of a snake,
to walk in definitive silence
What waste really is, and how grievous –
to make use of scraps, especially time
the importance of mending
the stitchless heart
Further, the scales on which I once weighed
importance revealed as inaccurate –
that you cannot weigh love
and integrity but become them
How to regard a snake, a spider, a shark, a cruel man
as metal ripe with darkness
but forged in that same kiln
as the self
How to wait, and to wait, and to love the waiting
until the waiting is not waiting
but being and respecting
all else its stillness
How to give and not think it
but perceive each loss from my hand
as a gift
in the other
To listen deeper to the music of my voice
in tones which are feathers and
swords – to speak
with an orchestra of wings
To abate opinion, cultivate listening
to hear with memory,
wisdom, patience,
love
To love the black days
and the gold, to release them to night
as though I am the blue heart turning
in the light of the sun
Complaint as erosion of each good that is dealt
Anger as a wholly adulterating fire
Complaint as a blindness, diminishing blessing
Anger’s theatre of masks
Sometimes the sun will beat down on one’s field
sometimes the rain and the storm –
neither is a curse but a season
each season a blessing
when both are reached
at the end of a great journey
no trophy ever mattered
Obedience to the ancient truths: not to lean
on the seen or the heard
but the untouchable, the haunting,
the easily mocked
Gradually –
the exact proportion of hate
to give to my failures
Finally – to love them
In the Hands of an Orange Sun
At dawn I stirred in the hands of an orange sun.
My dreams were chained, my children still young.
We journeyed down winding lanes that had burned
at dawn. Ice stared in the hands of an orange sun
and my daughters had had daughters. My son spurned
his train sets for coal and wrench, became a man
at dawn. I stirred in the sands of an orange sun.
My dreams were changed: my children, still young.
Mother Tongue
Zygote. Morula. Blastocyst. hcG. Viability. Amniocentesis. Toxoplasmosis. Trimester. Vena Cava. Anaemia. Ferrous Sulphate. Symphysis Pubis Dysfunction. Areola. Linea Negra. Fundus. Doula. Gina Ford. Quickening. Breech. Braxton Hicks. Group B Strep. Bloody Show. Kegel. Pre-eclampsia. Due. Overdue. TENS. Pethidine. Vernix. APGAR. Meconium. Bilirubin. Fontanelle. Colostrum. Rooting. Latching. Let-down. Engorgement. A cabbage leaf in the fridge. Hindmilk. Foremilk. Pumping. Mastitis. Reflux. Topping. Tailing. Mustard-yellow. Disposables. Hydrogels. China. SIDS. Jealous cats. Co-Sleeping. Attachment. Nasal extractor. Calpol. Infacol. Germs. Cooled boiled. Colic teets. Solids. Bumbo. Isofix. Gro-bag. Romper suit.Travel system. All-terrain. MMR. Activity spiral. Makaton. CBeebies. Separation anxiety. Controlled crying.Yummy. Slummy. Libido. Guilt.
All Right
A mother’s life
lived out on a ship
enormous planetary ship
that sways and is never still
and so she appears
to be staggering
slip-sliding between
opposites of time,
love, logistics, existential
and wholly complicated dilemmas
such as whether she is
wasting her life at the sink
or if she is in fact the wisest person alive
spending her days tending
to such small details of living
if she is doing it right
and by ‘it’, everything
if her children deserve better
than her
if she should have had more children
if she should have had them
earlier, closer
if she should have had
any at all
if she should have kept on
powering at her career
basked in the kind of recognition
and fabulous shoes
success would have brought
if, on her deathbed, the questions
she spends each moment of each day
shifting in her mind
will ever be answered
if a voice, a descending peace
will finally reply
yes, my dear, you did it all
one hundred per cent right
Acknowledgements
Drafts of some of these poems appeared in the following publications and thanks are due to the editors: Ambit, Magma, Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, The SHOp, New Walk Magazine, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Wales, The New Statesman, The Black Light Engine Room and Peony Moon.
‘Hare’ received a Commendation in the National Poetry Competition 2013.
I am extremely grateful to the Society of Authors for a K. Blundell award in 2011, and to New Writing North for awarding an early draft of the manuscript a Northern Promise Award in 2013, and for their continuing support.
Thanks to Degna Stone, Ira Lightman and particularly Anna Woodford for their comments on an early draft. Thanks to Amy Wack and all at Seren. Love and thanks to Evita Cooke and my husband Jared Jess-Cooke for being supportive and generally lovely, and to my children for everything, not least their inspiration.