I've begun writing poetry again. Truth be told I began last year when I was so deeply in depression thanks to my mother and her inscrutable ways, that, along with making art, poetry (and lyric writing) has been the only language I have been able to manage.
I have been pondering much, given my own experience of not being mothered, post 1975 anyway (all my memories of her actually being a mother to me stop there), and there are reasons for that too, but they are also for another time.
Of course I am now blogging again, but hoping the poetry will still be my companion. Here then, is a reasonably benign poem about some of my own experience of being a mother - there is a stash of other more hard core stuff from last year that is perhaps for another time:
How to be a mother?
God help me
What do I do?
How to be a mother
And write this too
How to be no trouble
But stick like glue
How to be a me to you and to you
(Times by three)
All you little people
That I made alive
How to be a mother to you and to you
(Times by two)
Here I am laptop on my lap
Possibly writing a poem about a cat
How can I do that?
When there are mouths to feed
Perhaps if I took speed
I could write in the night
Like those far off days when
To do so was alright?
The books I wrote
Abandoned in a drawer
Send us her next one
They asked for more
But how silly, how futile
The pen, it seems
When I am responsible now,
For all these little dreams
