Frances-Ann Norton: Poetry

Paternoster Part 2 What is my world of pain? Just thinking about it, riding round and round the Paternoster. It is the pain of remembrance. The feelings, the thoughts, the understanding The knowing what I have felt has a word, phrase. Yet not quite having the language to express it. Like Helen Keller with her hand in the water Letters, urgently, in rapid succession written on the other hand. W-A-T-E-R. And through the fog bank of realization comes a reflection of a conception of what it is. Having the experience of that event in my mind, to express the inner narrative, speaking the words out loud, I am not there yet. I have a taxonomy of all the words associated with that emotion Listed in my innerness, Someday soon I will speak the spoken the words out loud, Bring innerness to birth into the outside world. This is the start. Having the letters strung into words and phrases which make up the once secret, Now de-coded language, ...

The Change part 6: In the Fall-Out of Chernobyl, Black is Inapposite She is in her black as usual. Black coat and bag Black bra and knickers and slip Black dress All black, every day. Saying – he is dead and I am sorry The semiotics of the outfit. She is in her black dress at the doctor’s waiting room In the hospital Surrounded by women like her. Some crying silently, anxiously, some dead eyed, exhausted with an IV of nuclear-ness drip, drip, dripping into their bodies. With husbands With women friends With mothers, with daughters. She is alone, and happily so she needs a break from the well intentioned baggage of others. She looks at herself And she says “This narrative has to change”. This event marks a way stone, a departure from the path she thought she was going on. Her agency in this new reality asserts itself and says, “Dump the black, Live. This is your time now. He has had his slice of mourning, ...