My mother, in her agile mind…

My mother,
in her agile mind,
nurtured clairvoyance;
her tea- and cake-time séances
her mysticism in the parlours of an afternoon,
were the leaves in upturned cups
foreseeing tomorrow.

She had
a rapidity of the heart,
one hand on her breast
to comfort its hurried beating…

…and an eternity of worry,
her concern over small things,
the flood and ebb of family
every next day dawning
into her story, her time,
her telling.

Under her stars and signs,
a kind of presaged daylight flickered;
though it was a different wisdom,
one she did not know she had,
that illuminated her life and mine.

Prosaic,
commonplace love
ran its hand beneath
her infuriating kindness,
her sculpted vision of the living
and the dead speaking in tongues
among the littered yesterdays;
the memorials of them
longer gone than
I imagined…

…so long gone
in the years since
she shuffled off, one last time,
into the same dreamed-on hereafter.

Today, I scribbled my pencil on a page.

Erasing the graphite, I revealed a face
that brought to light some essence
of the woman who was there
in the first days of my rising
in the long years sliding
in the tidied histories
we tell the world
are only about
ourselves.

© BH, 2020

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It began with the drawing, as it happens; some comment about creating an image from what is rubbed out - revealed by erasure. Being a smartass and the comment being on social media, I had to show how quick off the mark I could be and post my own example. Only when it was done, I saw my mother’s face; her face in her later years; her old face.

It’s more than a decade since she died and I’ve not written much in her direction. I’ve written more about my father really - his war, his place in my life as a child, his death… But my mother, maybe it was too complicated, and the last years too exasperating for me to dig so deep.

Then this came forward: the dam leaking, the log-jam shifting, if only a little. Perhaps there’s more. Only time will tell…