Small flame for Sylvia
I put two candles in my handbag
and drive to North Tawton
where my parents lived for three years
in the un-tuned radio of early marriage.
That was still the sixties.
You’d have been a faint horizon of white static.
I’m not sure my mother ever read a poem.
Even I stare flatly back at them occasionally thinking wtf.
Can a town be built entirely out of milk and hasty marriages?
You weren’t any stamp of feminist and nor was mum.
You cooked and stitched. You managed house.
You joined the WI. My god.
Sashaying down the high street with a plate of nippled cakes.
The crackling american corsage of you.
What can you do by an english country churchyard
with two infants and a titan-slaying talent in the sixties.
Cry into the onions like my mother.
Coax the sweetness out of motherhood small spoon by small spon
Show your children how to put things softly in the ground.
Climb to the top of the house at night
and drive the spur of your perfectionism
hard into the slippy flank of language.
What a comet’s tail of ash and gold stars!
Still the dairy lorries swing their huge fumes through the square.
Prams bounce past with little parasols.
The yew tree is the one dark point. I’ll light them there.
Another woman with a city haircut shakes the shadows
from herself and stands to leave. You’re
a wedge in the chest of every poet-girl who ever knelt
in Blackwells on a dreary half-term afternoon.
The tree was split and nobody could get you back in
I put you quietly in my schoolbag. Always
It’s like opening a secret. Cool and lunar like an old
refrigerator raided in the night. Watch us stand there
all your sweet besotted daughters in old t-shirts thinking what now.
and drive to North Tawton
where my parents lived for three years
in the un-tuned radio of early marriage.
That was still the sixties.
You’d have been a faint horizon of white static.
I’m not sure my mother ever read a poem.
Even I stare flatly back at them occasionally thinking wtf.
Can a town be built entirely out of milk and hasty marriages?
You weren’t any stamp of feminist and nor was mum.
You cooked and stitched. You managed house.
You joined the WI. My god.
Sashaying down the high street with a plate of nippled cakes.
The crackling american corsage of you.
What can you do by an english country churchyard
with two infants and a titan-slaying talent in the sixties.
Cry into the onions like my mother.
Coax the sweetness out of motherhood small spoon by small spon
Show your children how to put things softly in the ground.
Climb to the top of the house at night
and drive the spur of your perfectionism
hard into the slippy flank of language.
What a comet’s tail of ash and gold stars!
Still the dairy lorries swing their huge fumes through the square.
Prams bounce past with little parasols.
The yew tree is the one dark point. I’ll light them there.
Another woman with a city haircut shakes the shadows
from herself and stands to leave. You’re
a wedge in the chest of every poet-girl who ever knelt
in Blackwells on a dreary half-term afternoon.
The tree was split and nobody could get you back in
I put you quietly in my schoolbag. Always
It’s like opening a secret. Cool and lunar like an old
refrigerator raided in the night. Watch us stand there
all your sweet besotted daughters in old t-shirts thinking what now.