Read This!

On days like today (not infrequent) when I still have not even seen my husband, I ponder the fortitude and saintliness of single mothers - every day like this, how do they do it? I'm off on my London trip in the morning, I have work to clear, packing to do, complex child-care arrangements to put in place and even the Church flowers for Sunday to sort out. Yet still the meals need cooked, the boys need bathed and they are, to put it simply, ever present.

And oh, I love them, but just one more adult in the house makes such a difference.

Anyway, a surprise the postman brought has cheered me somewhat. Inside the interesting-looking envelope (the hand-written address ones are always the good ones, aren't they?) were two copies of the 'zine, Read This.
It's produced in Edinburgh by Claire Askew of One Night Stanzas, here: http://www.readthismagazine.co.uk/onenightstanzas/

Number 18 is a special edition for the (you guessed it) London Poetry Festival, and Claire selected this poem of mine to go in it. It's from my pamphlet, The Fat Plant.

Mourning

I

The funniest bits of the funeral?
The manifestations of Mum’s two fears.
First, her prayer for no floral tributes
in the shape of animals or words,
“Like some East End gangster”,
unanswered at 10 am when chrysanthemum-clustered
lambs, dogs and sheep arrived to graze and herd
between the wreaths and crosses on the lawn.
But Best in Show the huge horned ram’s head
a Bennetts man in black selected
for pride of place upon your hearse,
up top, facing front, a figurehead
that looked like the Goat of Mendes,
and we a cortege of Satanists.

Thirteen black Rollers and Bentleys
paged slowly up the M25
to the mother-of-pearl Church
of St. Mary the Virgin, Great Warley.

Second (you couldn’t make it up)
at the graveside your coffin
would not fit into the hole they’d dug,
“I told them make it big. I told them he was a big man.”
Bated breath with the vicar’s words,
all eyes on the bearers, could they hold on,
they were sweating by then
and re-adjusting straps round wrists,
but you, you weren’t never going down there:
confounding us all, as ever.
And we laughed hard, as Palmers will,
for when your father is Dick Palmer
you may laugh and roar
in the very face of death itself.

II

The next day we cleared up from the party,
Mum and me, alone in the house now.
Then I wandered, photographing the flowers,
and one of Mum, shoeless, sitting in shadow.
We wandered all day,
and it was so lonely
that in the evening you came back;
I saw you momently in your chair,
and Mum smelt the pipe-smoke
she had cursed for nigh on forty years.

And that great brick house you had built for us
a mere life-raft
in the Southern Ocean of loss.

III

Of course you died too young; had you not
your divinity would not have been assured.
But oh Dad, you did no good
by dying decades early.
We remained foundered, as when any
tyrant leaves there is anarchy
and opportunity.

We look at each other and think,
“I know what you did.”