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A Song of Myself - Poetry Thursday

Confinement
Triune

I

One morning, you wake
to the rumble of the wardrobe door
as the 8.10am bus bears
your eldest child over the speed ramp,
along the street where you live.

Groggy, you rise, tiptoeing
downstairs to the kitchen, pull
out a saucepan, placing it quietly,
pouring in the white shush of milk
and turn the knob.

A warm breakfast feeds
five other children. You wake them
from their duveted dreams,
place the dishes on a dining table,
with spoons and call on them to eat.

Making lunches of ham, always ham,
and bananas instead of apples, sealed
in plastic boxes – one, two, three, four, five,
and fill their bottles; three pink ones,
two black ones.

In the tumult of their trousers, tights and shirts
you fill their bags and send them, hatted,
scarved and gloved, to school
and listen to a silence frayed
by the distant rumble of a wardrobe door.

As the kettle reaches boiling point,
you turn on your PC and plan a menu for tea.

II

Tuned to the noises of her home –
she rose fairly soft with rosy cheeks.
A house upon a road that ran
from east to west across two countries.

One country of army towers and ramps
of sudden khakied strangers, talking into
radio sets worn on shoulders that carried guns
and the scent of an older menace.

The other country of cattle, the smell of manure.
A faded cottage in a colour garden,
of lawns and apple trees. Box hedges borderlined
a market garden, kings and cabbages suffocated

by the trees gone over through excess of water
and light. Both sides of the one coin, spent
by two families of the one branch.

But she rises, fairly soft with rosy cheeks,
she is seven, not six, nor eight neither.
She does not know.

III

Before you knew, in the sense of that awareness,
what you held? The song of wood pigeons calling,
answering, in the wood behind your home,
told all – the realm of territory, a few square mile

to fly over, a wood of trees before the disease
killed slowly, choking out the birds, giving less
cover to the games of children; cops and robbers,
cowboys and ‘injuns – heard but never played with.

A solitary breeze blows across a marsh field
your playground; hillocks and mounds preparing
you for the tumble of ancient monuments
and the organised disorder of grass that died.

IV

A square box of a bedsit: a bed, a wardrobe,
a sink and a counter gashed with a white cooker.
A black-and-white TV, a three-in-one stereo.
White counterpane, white walls plastered

with teenage detritus. Posters faded, frayed
matchsticks, butts, sink full of dirty knickers,
a pedal-powered Singer, that served
as dressing table. Nights of ‘Sex Dwarf’

and days of black clothes and maquette faces.
An apprenticeship of make-up, drinks,
appetites for loud, thoughtless remarks;
a remaking of personality within those walls.

V

Breathless with the pulsing, purging pain –
you’ve got to feel your way toward
the end of this. You’re stuck in this panting,
waiting time. It’s four in the morning,

the black outside the frosted window fades
grey. They tell you it will be soon.
You’re waiting on your body too.
You know it’s a big ask, to push 4.2 kilos

up a hill, whilst lying on your back,
but vertical’s out of the question now.
You beg them to cut you, anything to
get it over. The midwife smiles a secret

to herself, knowing you at that point
of baby before body. And so you push,
getting ready for the crinkled blue, basted
with vernix and more hair than ever thought of.

VI

A summer gone by, hearing children’s voices
playing make-believe: doctors and nurses,
houses and schools, their world populated
by your roles and those of imaginary

friends – too sketchy to make
it into this world. Your’s had no image,
just a voice that helped at night, before the
days of siblings, when you needed language

out loud. Their’s have blurs
from Pokemon or Yugioh, cartoonish
colours that hop-scotch with them
around the water-feature and up the garden path.

VII

The side window at the top of the stairs
overlooks next door’s stage of patio doors.
Twin boys of one, orbit their mother,
dark haired, framing her company.

She’s always hanging clothes up,
when I catch her, on an airer inside;
not much drying in this drab winter.
I guess that she sees brighter colours

back home, kept wrapped inside her
head-dress. A colour like orange
or red doesn’t glimmer here under grey.
Better held inside for warmth.

And behind me the crone sleeps
in the morning. She wakes at night.
I hear her voice, alcohol tempered
she drones a life by, without waiting for a reply.

If you made it down this far - thanks very much for reading!

Another Short Story Competition

A short story competition for intelligent short stories for the 12 year old and up

Closing date is a good bit away: 30 January 2007, so that gives plenty of time to write it up and test it out on some of your feckers!

I'm going to give it a go in November/December :¬)

Horrendously Busy!

These last three weeks have been a challenge in many senses, since I seem to have bitten off more than I thought I could chew! First of all, there were the pressing needs of getting the kids back to school, which were compounded by the taking on of a new job.

The job in itself is simply a means to an end - cash - so I won't go on about it.

But the real sticking point was trying to tie up late course essays, which in effect are a form of revision. On the nineteenth century course, the emphasis was on comparing and contrasting an earlyish text with a later nineteenth century text in terms of context and how that could add greater meaning to the text. At least that is how I interpreted the essay choice! I can now say that I have revised Jane Eyre and Dracula to the point of distraction and hope that either of those novels might prove useful in the exaxm.

On the twentieth century course, I am in the process of judging two novels (Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig), for an imagined literary prize and am still working out which one should win. I am notoriously indecisive and keep wavering between one novel over another. The problem is that the more I look at them the more I like them both!

Once this prevaricating is out of the way, it only remains for me to do a lot of revision and the exam for the nineteenth century course on the 11th October. Which brings me up short at the realisation of today's date.