This Was Your Mother

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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‘My Son’s Life-Story Book’ was the winner of the 2020 Charroux Prize for Poetry:

 

My Son’s Life Story Book

 

This smiling woman wants my memories

for a life story book she’s compiling,

so my child will know where he came from

in the context of where he now belongs,

not here, but with a new improved mummy,

writing his next chapter alongside hers,

creating a text I’ve been removed from.

 

The woman squeezes past me in the hall

where he battled to crawl, my brain rattling

with the little stories I cling on to

now he is gone. She wants to take photos

of pertinent things. Take one of me, please,

I want to plead, but show her his bedroom,

an unfilled space where his cot used to be,

 

you can still see the glow in the dark stars

I stared at during those never-ending nights,

holding his hand through the bars of that cot,

telling stories about the sparkling stars,

We will escape to them someday, I’d say.

 

She can’t picture that shining happiness

that came into my battered bruised body

when his hand was in mine like a secret.

 

The woman wants anything I can give,

she grins as I give a lock of his hair,

tear off the scan pic attached to the fridge,

kissing goodbye to that small waving fist

to be bonded onto a nurse-clean page,

in a drawer’s belly are notes on first foods,

she stuffs them without a glance into her bag

with a snap of him Velcro-ed against me,

she wants facts the most: place of birth, date, weight,

has questions about religion, work, health,

my emotions have no place in this book,

he doesn’t need to know my life story,

such truths serve no purpose to my child,

history is just that, his story, not mine.

 

These books can help children to move forward,

the woman says, as she prepares to go.

Thank you for your time and the memories.

 

I am left in his room, staring at stars.

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