Join Bloodaxe for this launch event for the winners of the James Berry Poetry Prize and the Mslexia Women's Pamphlet Competition. Live on YouTube Tues 29 Sept, 7pm BST.
When the wall goes up
the animals make room for it.
When you meet a wall, your first thought
is to find a pen, draw windows, open doors.
Hospital trauma wards close to the border
are full with fall-related injuries.
Your bedroom wall is canvas, long grass, palm trees,
measure for how tall you’re growing.
I teach you to run in an emergency.
You ask if you can bring your crayons
and all the animals you’re learning to name.
Rio Grande leopard frogs,
six cane toads, two shrews,
five tarantulas, one yellow-billed cuckoo.
A dozen snakes. Mexican racers,
checkered garters, Texas patch-nosed serpents.
All burn alive. Even the birds,
who might have outpaced the flames, hit the wall
with no time to change direction.
We make tickets for each other,
excited you and frightened I,
so when the fire comes, we can run
for the bus for the train for the end of the world
where only new things happen.
*
Kent State Pietà
Her first peace march and my niece is asking
why we aren’t going to where the war is happening.
I tell her it’s something to do with war,
how it makes walls of all of us, and does something
to time and space, like we’re here together
but we’re also there. I can’t make sense
for this five-year-old girl
who holds a placard above her head,
a slice of watermelon on her cheek.
Einstein says the speed of time
depends on our frame of reference.
In the photograph the student lies flat,
arms tucked bunny-like under his chest.
A girl is kneeling over him.
The black and white makes it easy to miss
the stream of blood that runs from his mouth,
stains her jeans and pools at the kerb.
She’s looking right into the camera lens,
an arm outstretched, a hand upturned,
half disbelief, half begging for help,
too young to know he’s already dead.
In the background I see myself,
except it’s a man and he’s looking away.
Hands in pockets, his gait seems slow
as if he is crossing an empty road.
*
Frontier 24 May 2000 (after Mai Masri)
When the way was clear to the border
they travelled on buses for miles
stalked by soldiers spitting gum.
The people paid them no mind,
hearts set on seeing their land
and meeting the strangers they loved.
They called out surnames, held photographs
fifty-two years old, passed prickly pears
over razor wire, sacks of apples and bread.
They loosened watches from their wrists,
unclasped the gold from their necks.
So you’ll never forget me. I’ll never forget you.
They cupped the earth, filled pockets with home.
Let me kiss you said a boy to an uncle
and cocked his head, slid it clear of the metal spikes,
pressed his lips to the old man’s face.
They clung to the border, their palms a perfect fit
between the barbed parts of the wire,
fingers finding that space between one threat
and the next, as if peace were a resting place
and freedom a thing to hold.
*
Pelican daughter
I came, neck craned upwards, mouth open,
beak as sharp as the arrow of my hair.
People use the word delivery,
but I was torn from the depths of you.
I’d seen more of you than you had of yourself.
You felt ensnared by love.
The first time we found ourselves alone,
you thought, midwives are mothers who disappear.
You kept the hall light on so you could watch my body
rise and fall with breath.
I looked like a fish when I latched,
small mouth full of flesh.
I loved most to sleep at your breast,
your skin my lavender.
Each time I stirred, reshuffle of limbs,
you played dead so I would settle.
Awake I was a beetle on its back,
all arms and legs, begging to be picked up.
The first time I cried, quiver of lip, pleading eyes,
you heard your heart splinter.
Still you came to hate the colour pink.
The sore need of it. Hunger.
I was blue with want. Baby bird. Competition.
Only later I understood.
They cut through seven layers of you.
I was born in a pool of your blood.
*
Maternal Assessment Unit
We are all vessels for something,
dead things, growing things.
The midwife’s last question
is about my mental health.
Weight carried about our heads,
watermelons around our middles.
Last week my mystery child
was given the all clear.
In the waiting-room
a man stood to offer his seat.
He turned to face the TV.
It’s taking my mind off it, he said.
Later I saw his worried face
through a door the midwife briefly opened.
His love lay strapped to a blinking machine
listening for the sound of a heart.
Contents List
I
13 Seagull
14 One hundred animals
16 Kent State Pietà
17 Hackney Central
18 Back next Thursday
19 Pride
20 Beautiful life
21 I console myself with jigsaws
22 Half-life theory
23 Jesus on the towpath
24 Endling
25 August
26 Ceasefire
II
28 Gospel Oak
29 Frontier 24 May 2000
30 Newton’s cradle
31 Touching
32 Nunnery
33 The kiss
34 Postcard
35 White porcelain button
36 A moment without you
37 They said the flour would arrive at four
38 Returning from the peace march
III
40 Pelican daughter
42 Transference
43 Alphabites
44 Sleep-talk
45 Paper butterfly
46 Accidental taxidermist
47 Trees and houses
48 First day back
49 Clay star
50 Young hare
51 Motherese
52 Lichtjahre
IV 54 January
55 Close by the Aspens
56 What the plum teaches
57 Millfields Park
58 In vitro
59 What is sickness
60 Edge
61 The train to Chingford
62 Like new
63 Natura morta
64 April
V
66 All it takes
67 In the middle pages of her memoir
68 Nothing can happen
69 If you ask me what I have left to give
70 Ealing Broadway
71 Naming the money
72 Taking a pregnancy test in Dublin
73 September
74 Ceramic seashell
VI
77 December
78 The family
79 Telling my sister
80 Lately I’ve melted
81 Baby on board
82 Umbilical cord
83 Maternal Assessment Unit
84 Black Park
85 Golden days
86 Detached houses
87 Autumn leaves
88 Fox is dying
89 Bellinghausen Sea
90 Christmas Eve
