Boom!

by Carolyn Jess-Cooke

  when the fourth child is born she receives no gifts –

  I swear it, not one –

  for it is largely taken that her overly keen parents

  are besieged by baby stuff and will be only too pleased

  to dig out the mothballed basket and yellowing vests.

  Her beauty is scored in comparison to her older siblings

  and within an instant is ignored

  as though she emerged in a tide of doppelgängers.

  This is only how other people react

  but to her mother the fourth child is an epiphany,

  thorn in the side of St Patrick, plucked,

  the face of God, unveiled,

  a truth so grave as to be holy –

  she could have four more babies and ten more after that

  and, heaven help her, another dozen

  and the fear that seized her

  when she was pregnant for the second time –

  that she might not feel quite what she felt for the first –

  has long since vanished. This fourth child

  could be her twentieth, her seventieth, her eighteen

  thousand and sixteenth, and yet

  the beleaguered, over-worked and too-shadowed heart

  would still find a way to pick up its bags

  sling them over its shoulder

  and begin its hellacious and lonely expedition

  to all the unexplored countries of love.

  What We Talk About When We Talk About Motherhood

  which reminds me that it didn’t happen

  overnight but very gradually and subtly

  my mind keened away from the catalogue

  of thoughts which had sat in it snug as eggs

  in a nest for almost thirty years to a shore

  of thoughts about every possible topic

  that involved babies and mothering

  I found myself in deep earnest conversation

  with nameless women in libraries and parks

  and airport queues and at the supermarket

  while searching for the cheapest baked beans,

  we’d never share our names but we’d share

  our experiences of teething and weaning and

  being late for everything and sleep training

  precisely because it was like free-hand climbing

  the tallest red rock face in Utah the only human

  for miles and randomly coming across another

  similarly occupied hominid but then it was

  more than that, it was a kind of baptism

  in the middle of the Pacific

  rolling up on a strange and

  lonely and astoundingly beautiful island and

  making new friends with the others

  who staggered up the beach, their arms full

  with this new life, and it was more than who

  I made friends with and it was more than

  the way my shopping trolley saw fewer

  ready meals and more organic produce

  and it was more than anything I can yet describe

  but it began with my thoughts which keened

  towards topics my former self would have labeled

  ‘boring’ but which now possessed me

  and when I say I was thinking endlessly about

  how exactly to prepare six bottles in one go

  and whether she should be starting to sit up

  by now and whether I should give in and let

  him sleep in our bed or persist with the cot

  I was not thinking about any of this at all

  but feminism, about the government,

  about Africa, about astronomy, about history,

  about nature, creativity, about God.

  Clay

  Our children are so soft, we imprint them

  like a heavy sole stepping into mud

  not breaking the ground but reordering

  its elements, the way it will hitherto

  hold water, light, the curious nose of wind

  and voice of earth. Even when later rain

  smoothes out that patina something of the mark

  holds. Even when the sun whips the wetness

  to its pools of night and the stiffened ground

  wears its shelled-out grooves, when these deepen

  in each punching hail and hollowing storm

  the pattern may be nothing like the original

  print but art in its own way, no trace of boot

  apparent in the striving clay.

  In Joy I Have Asked Questions

  after Carol Rumens

  In joy I have asked questions

  But in sorrow I asked more.

  Is the point of pain to make us ask

  Why we live, and what for?

  One Hundred Years After the Suffragettes

  Some days, a razing slowness.

  Five o’clock want of unctuous roads.

  Anxiety’s striations another kind of rain

  down the lens: more redundancies.

  A murmuration of interest rates.

  My Plan B involves a house

  built with mud and clay, off the grid,

  some chickens. At playgroup the mothers

  re-fashion their feminist principles.

  Most of us are working two full-time jobs.

  Some days, the kind of slowness

  that sings our children’s growth

  like time lapse films of mushrooms

  flinging up their polka dot skirts:

  a dress our daughter wore last summer

  is suddenly too short. Our son writes

  me a love note, boulevards of vowels

  like skywriting.The baby’s illness unfists.

  Some days the nettles and brambles

  swoon just long enough for me

  to reach both hands into that sweet river

  and sup at what I am living for.

  Life Questions

  And life will ask, what have you made of me?

  I will show my art, my children, the state of my soul.

  And life will ask, how have you spent me?

  I will account for the days of nothingness and those

  of greatness,

  and life will smile at my interpretation of nothingness

  and greatness.

  Life will say, how have you loved me?

  And there will be measures of hatred amongst my love,

  too many,

  for it is often too simple to love.

  Then, life will stretch out its wings and say, how have you

  shared me? Gifted me?

  It will seem I shared a single black tear

  from the wealth of the watermelon.

  Each moment life says

  take this, and this, and this.

  The Mire

  These trenches are endured alone,

  and at times so thick

  with sucking mud and cloying fog,

  so much enemy fire at one woman

  that it seems there will be no end

  and no happiness,

  that somewhere along the line

  you did not sign up for this,

  are not made for this.

  Perhaps the mire

  is you being made

  for this.

  So the soft cotton tufts are plucked

  from the cloud fields

  then wound and wound

  to usefulness.

  So the string inches

  up the cello bridge,

  never closer to breaking

  when it sounds its

  true note.

  Weft

  They call it ‘broodiness’, or ‘feeling broody’,

  biological weft in the body’s rich cloth

  designed as impetus to reproduce – but really

  it’s more than that, stubborn as nostalgia, trough

  in rationality, elemental metal forged in love

  but made of – what? The gateway’s cl
osed,

  my body will never clasp another pulse, will not glove

  the root and stem of a reddening rose.

  No more beginnings, no genesis in my ending,

  no more will milk waken, like hope, to stab the skin,

  yet it persists! Ghostly craving, devoted midwife

  wanting all to flower – the woof and warp of life.

  The Lessons

  How to love that which does not give love

  immediately, which does not smile much

  nor laugh but which asks and asks

  and takes more than you can give

  Physical lessons, too – mastery

  of contortion, how to achieve a night’s

  sleep on the width of a snake,

  to walk in definitive silence

  What waste really is, and how grievous –

  to make use of scraps, especially time

  the importance of mending

  the stitchless heart

  Further, the scales on which I once weighed

  importance revealed as inaccurate –

  that you cannot weigh love

  and integrity but become them

  How to regard a snake, a spider, a shark, a cruel man

  as metal ripe with darkness

  but forged in that same kiln

  as the self

  How to wait, and to wait, and to love the waiting

  until the waiting is not waiting

  but being and respecting

  all else its stillness

  How to give and not think it

  but perceive each loss from my hand

  as a gift

  in the other

  To listen deeper to the music of my voice

  in tones which are feathers and

  swords – to speak

  with an orchestra of wings

  To abate opinion, cultivate listening

  to hear with memory,

  wisdom, patience,

  love

  To love the black days

  and the gold, to release them to night

  as though I am the blue heart turning

  in the light of the sun

  Complaint as erosion of each good that is dealt

  Anger as a wholly adulterating fire

  Complaint as a blindness, diminishing blessing

  Anger’s theatre of masks

  Sometimes the sun will beat down on one’s field

  sometimes the rain and the storm –

  neither is a curse but a season

  each season a blessing

  Joy has no trophies, peace has no trophies,

  when both are reached

  at the end of a great journey

  no trophy ever mattered

  Obedience to the ancient truths: not to lean

  on the seen or the heard

  but the untouchable, the haunting,

  the easily mocked

  Gradually –

  the exact proportion of hate

  to give to my failures

  Finally – to love them

  In the Hands of an Orange Sun

  At dawn I stirred in the hands of an orange sun.

  My dreams were chained, my children still young.

  We journeyed down winding lanes that had burned

  at dawn. Ice stared in the hands of an orange sun

  and my daughters had had daughters. My son spurned

  his train sets for coal and wrench, became a man

  at dawn. I stirred in the sands of an orange sun.

  My dreams were changed: my children, still young.

  Mother Tongue

  Zygote. Morula. Blastocyst. hcG. Viability. Amniocentesis. Toxoplasmosis. Trimester. Vena Cava. Anaemia. Ferrous Sulphate. Symphysis Pubis Dysfunction. Areola. Linea Negra. Fundus. Doula. Gina Ford. Quickening. Breech. Braxton Hicks. Group B Strep. Bloody Show. Kegel. Pre-eclampsia. Due. Overdue. TENS. Pethidine. Vernix. APGAR. Meconium. Bilirubin. Fontanelle. Colostrum. Rooting. Latching. Let-down. Engorgement. A cabbage leaf in the fridge. Hindmilk. Foremilk. Pumping. Mastitis. Reflux. Topping. Tailing. Mustard-yellow. Disposables. Hydrogels. China. SIDS. Jealous cats. Co-Sleeping. Attachment. Nasal extractor. Calpol. Infacol. Germs. Cooled boiled. Colic teets. Solids. Bumbo. Isofix. Gro-bag. Romper suit.Travel system. All-terrain. MMR. Activity spiral. Makaton. CBeebies. Separation anxiety. Controlled crying.Yummy. Slummy. Libido. Guilt.

  All Right

  A mother’s life

  lived out on a ship

  enormous planetary ship

  that sways and is never still

  and so she appears

  to be staggering

  slip-sliding between

  opposites of time,

  love, logistics, existential

  and wholly complicated dilemmas

  such as whether she is

  wasting her life at the sink

  or if she is in fact the wisest person alive

  spending her days tending

  to such small details of living

  if she is doing it right

  and by ‘it’, everything

  if her children deserve better

  than her

  if she should have had more children

  if she should have had them

  earlier, closer

  if she should have had

  any at all

  if she should have kept on

  powering at her career

  basked in the kind of recognition

  and fabulous shoes

  success would have brought

  if, on her deathbed, the questions

  she spends each moment of each day

  shifting in her mind

  will ever be answered

  if a voice, a descending peace

  will finally reply

  yes, my dear, you did it all

  one hundred per cent right

  Acknowledgements

  Drafts of some of these poems appeared in the following publications and thanks are due to the editors: Ambit, Magma, Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, The SHOp, New Walk Magazine, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Wales, The New Statesman, The Black Light Engine Room and Peony Moon.

  ‘Hare’ received a Commendation in the National Poetry Competition 2013.

  I am extremely grateful to the Society of Authors for a K. Blundell award in 2011, and to New Writing North for awarding an early draft of the manuscript a Northern Promise Award in 2013, and for their continuing support.

  Thanks to Degna Stone, Ira Lightman and particularly Anna Woodford for their comments on an early draft. Thanks to Amy Wack and all at Seren. Love and thanks to Evita Cooke and my husband Jared Jess-Cooke for being supportive and generally lovely, and to my children for everything, not least their inspiration.