Empty Rooms

After Charlotte Mew’s ‘Rooms’,
“Rooms where for good or ill – things died”. P 26, Modern Women Poets

The sad empty feeling I get
Like stepping into a ruin of a house
An abandoned room
Bereft of habitation
Peeling paint in an industrial mint blue
A sick, gut drop
I’m in it
The smell of fustiness
Mixed with rotted leaves.

Poetry
It takes me
Drags me where I would not walk.

A word
Is removal from my bed, my armchair
To this empty room.

This room with splintered ceiling letting in
Harsh sun light
A metal bed frame
Exposed concrete
I’m here - I’m straight here
This is my sad place
This is my desolation
My empty pit.

Where is that child?
The one I never saw with my real eyes?
Apart from
The flow of blood, the flood of blood
Which swept her away
This child
Who would be now
10 or 11.

Cloth of glowing colours floating in a Turkish sky
The sun
Making transparencies of
The woven lengths
In rich blues and magentas.

And they say
It will pass
You’ll get over it
Try for another one
It wasn’t meant to be
Nature’s way of getting rid of a mistake.

They could be right.

And they are all wrong too.
This was my child
And I loved her and understood what it is
To bear a child, to be a mother
In my own way.

I was ready
She was deeply wanted
And is fathoms deep missed
Oceans wide longed for
Mountains high mourned for
Lakes wide reflected upon 
this mystery.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Collect Art Publication July 2023

Image
 First published in Collect Arts Summer 2023 edition Stone all the flowers   The year of the art school tutorials. The difficult woman you are to me, and the difficulty I present to you. The year of my recovery and your husband’s death.   Your husband fails and worsens through the days of our trimesters together. As he weakens and declines, I grow incrementally stronger. As if terrible fatalistic scales of balance, set and reset.   Do not cheat her. Give her a full measure of time and experiences with him. Pressed down, shaken together and overflowing. She, in the face of all this decay   Chooses to destroy flowers with stones. Until their purple hearts stained the cartridge with their elemental pigments.   She cuts the flowers only to waste them in the parching sun. It is the cycle of being and unbeing, the grass withers and the flower fades (Isiah 40:8). She decides to press her flowers till their lungs burst on fine co...
Read more
Image
Blackbird Egg Time slows down in the Victorian mirror. She is haunted by every face that checked themselves in the glass. She is on the cusp. A life about to begin in earnest, on the tipping point of adulthood. On the apex of future relationships, sexuality and desire. “Yes” she says, “that’s me in the mirror”, long brown hair, grey-blue eyes. She is just an ordinary brown bird. But common or garden blackbirds create sky eggs, objects of beauty and desire. Each one speckled slightly differently in the genus. If only she can create of herself such an object of yearning, her small brownness will be worth the transformation. On the Hall-stand crafted in a grand antique style, are a collection of blackbird’s eggs. Saved in small glass containers with their lids tight shut. Through the glass she sees pale blue specked eggs, broken with raggedy edges. The armoire ominously overshadows her slight fourteen year old self. Whom she sees reflected back in multiple mirrors, framed in the warm glea...
Read more

Chap Book #3 Gone With The Wind

Image
  Delighted to be published in:-  https://www.cistaarts.com/product-page/chapbook-series-3-gone-with-the-wind Learning craft from the wind   There was once a woman. Who learned craft from wind, art from the sea and design from the earth. She sewed intricate organic patterns in labyrinthine repeats. Her creativity was celebrated through the land. She was known as La Corachine, beautiful shell of the sea. Her daughter Powys was as natural as the elements, precious as comfort and radiant with gold-nature. One day an old woman coloured like an autumn day came to their door. “I want what is yours.” She said, and stuck a pin into the girl, who transformed into a brown-bird and flew off. “Old woman”, cried the mother, please cook a meat and potato pie for us. “Of course”, she sang, catching the brown-bird-daughter. And made her into a pie with potato skins. The leftover bones she threw into a corner of the garden. In three days, a beautiful tree g...
Read more