Mother's Day

Mother who has been

my broken bowl           my holy grail

my long silence                        my spoken truth

my tiny bound feet      my seven league boots

my never quite             my every first prize

when you come on the forgotten well among the trees

lower the bucket, hand over hand: the rope will hold

as you draw up the cold clear water. Feel how it cools

your blood’s wild fire, scorched earth greens back, seeds burst,

and you can read again the hieroglyphics of branches

budding across the sky. Birds wake to fly and small animals

uncurl among the nascent ferns. Listen –

a child’s untroubled voice rings on the morning air, singing

as you fetch water for your mother from the wood well

and nothing will be lost.

Here is your father, once the youngest boy

neighbours had ever seen between

the handles of a plough, the hardest worker.

He lies under my heart carved in stone,

grown to the man who never wept.

Soft as a breast, your mother

is my children’s remembered dream of milky mouths.

Each thought undone, each memory unpeeled,

each year of you, I fold, hold to my cheek

like the white linen your grandmother sewed

by candlelight. I breathe you in, the living skin of me

knowing it was always too late for us, for everything

happens as it must, in its own moment.

As I become the past on which the future rests,

forgiveness is a final irrelevance.

Years from now, on some perfect summer evening,

I will look and you’ll be in the garden, gathering fruit.

A small dog will follow at your heels

as you pick gooseberries, bursting juice,

strawberries red ripe under leaves.

When you see me, you will beckon me to come,

and I’ll run down the years into your arms.

From Snakeskin Stilettos 1998