May 14, 2020
NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 13
Dear All,
So here we are on the two-months-in of the lock-down, that is already being eased up in several places – and it’s May, my birthday month and that of two of my brothers, as well as my daughter and two of my close friends. Fellow Taureans, have the best time you can! Raise a glass! We are good at it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my parents – I’m here because of them – and of what they went through in World War 2. Five years of war, and for the civilian population and many others, a far longer and more intensely anguishing version of lock-down, with no end in sight, (and daily bombing of cities, e.g. London, where I was born.) It’s made me think, we can do this, we have the capacity, it’s so little compared to their experience, and that of people in the Great Depression here in the US too. Don’t let’s take risks too soon. And, look at the trees!
Here are a couple of my recent poems for this month.
Ancestors
My husband shovels dirt and compost, hefts the spade
as his Kentucky grandfather did in a lost century.
He hauls wood, carpenters a floor;
cuts, saws, hammers, makes our foundation firm.
These days, these home-bound days, I make soup,
scrub and scour surfaces, do laundry, hang out clothes,
as my mother did in post-war England.
As if our ancestors rise in us, sensing the threat
of lethargy or gloom, and fill
our hands with tools and paring knives,
give us our useful projects to complete:
make a floor, clean closets, hang out sheets to dry.
As if they reach through us, those old ones
used to tasks and hardship, living through war,
bad harvest, illness no-one could cure. As if
they see us clearly in our modern age, our phones
and screens, our idle hands, our deep anxieties.
We find their skills in us, learn through them to survive,
enjoy the day, and know it’s all we have.
My daughter an ocean away, raises hens, grows lettuce,
plants a tree. We talk on the phone of eggs, seeds,
makeshift recipes. Who is it, I wonder,
generations back, who speaks through her?
Who, inside me, listens and knows so well that voice?
And another one: (enough about laundry for now?)
Clean Sheets, Again
Early I lift the wet sheets to the line
under the jasmine tree and pull them taut
to bleach in one more day’s
relentless sun. No rain for weeks.
The sky’s pillow-case blue, beach-towel blue.
Already the brick path burns my feet as I
return to gather in the armfuls,
dry in an hour. The cloudy meringue-crust
embrace of billowed white, scribble
of shadow on a shifting canvas
to spread across our big bed and fold
corners as my mother showed me,
she in me as I bend and tuck, where
blue petals scatter still from the flowering
plumbago, where we’ll lie later
washed cool from the outdoor shower.
One more night. Twenty-five years on,
And the outdoors in here with us,
jasmine, plumbago, sun and light.
We sleep after our labor - as if we were young
and nest-building again, because it’s spring
and the birds do it, because time has stopped
and so much else does not matter.
As if we were young, sleep comes easy
with the weight of our old tiredness.
Be well, be safe,
Affectionately, Ros