The poet has brought her daughters
to the Commonwealth Literature Conference
and they have brought their knitting.
The knitting is pink and large:
soft balls of wool skewered by needles
lodge casually on a velvet chair
behind the dignitaries.
Bright as Jane Austen’s heroines
these young girls miss nothing
behind their chattering needles:
speeches, introductions,
the huffs behind the puff,
poets whose standing
is not on their dignity,
whose words are their own fulfilment.
Eminent names here
could be shattered one day
by a slight chance recollection
of one of these girls, reminiscent,
looking up as she does
from her knitting.
The guillotine rises, falls.
1988
After the sculptures have been removed to the New Scottish Gallery of Modern Art in John Watson’s School, 1985
‘That was Henry Moore’s Reclining Woman’ –
He pointed out a shape of yellowed grass
where the large recumbent stone
had welcomed clamb’ring children,
tentative caresses.
‘And there stood Epstein’s Christ
Christian soldier-like
sentinel of the city
watchman who never slept.’
I looked toward the trees beside the path
where first I saw that figure,
the city spread before him;
and always, looking up,
I’d know a stab of stern respect:
he could have bowed down
to have the kingdoms of this world.
‘Once a girl rose from the lily pond –
a nymph with head inclined,
diverse fishes glinted.’
These figures now have been transplanted,
plucked as no gardener would do,
no soil taken with them,
no attentive placement
to placate their genius.
We feel their absent presence
where once we used to meet them,
sense the exile they must know
in having left their Eden,
and the loss we find
in this unpeopled garden.
1994
My love walked in a wild domain
I followed him as best I could
beyond the boundaries of the brain
half credible, half understood.
He hardly slept, strange music played
he wrote, dreamed, painted.
In love I pitied, helped him work
on copper plates, the ink and fire.
We cooled it down in printed books
of prophecy or soul’s desire.
‘The lark an angel on the wing’
purest line engraving.
and silent brooded on the house.
I waited, made his soup, his clothes
until he found a form in chaos.
I gathered fragments he had scattered:
Job, Dante, Milton uttered.
I rocked no babies at the breast:
this child I had was child enough.
Like Mary I was chosen, blessed
to bear this spirit through his life.
‘Jerusalem in every man’
this grain of sand in Albion.
My love walked in a wild domain
I followed him as best I could
beyond the boundaries of the brain
half credible, half understood.
We turned our trials into art
hammered the work upon the heart.
1998