See you!

In the interests of simplicity, from now on I shall be blogging on my website: http://mandyhaggith.worldforests.org/blog.asp

See you there!

Goodbye Mum

My Mum died last week. I've never been sadder. These poems are for her funeral. The first I wrote after Mum took me to Ilkley, in Yorkshire, where she grew up, to show me around her memory lanes. The second I have just written and the third is the title poem from my first poetry collection.

Return to Ilkley

For the first time now I see your view

up onto the open moor

from your childhood bedroom in the house

you say seems small

although to me it’s four storeys tall

and full of tales you must recall.

Here’s the graveyard where you walked your dog,

stone backstreets where you used to play,

the path you took beside the River Wharfe.

It's the Big House that seems diminutive,

front door blocked up, stables gone, no garage for the Rolls

in which your father wooed the cook, your mum,

as they shopped for the rich man’s dining hall.

You gesture to the meadow filled with daffodils -

now flats. No bulbs

survived the brick new builds.

You do not cry at all

not even though the role of honour's gone,

from Ilkley Grammar School

your name, head girl, no longer on the wall.

After your father came back from war

you set off for the family’s first degree.

So now I think I see what you saw

up the attic stair and through the door,

out onto the open moor.

Teacher

From Mum I learned what’s good in life and what’s wrong

Though I was the wicked little one.

From Mum I learned all the flowers and trees

how to read and write, fight for what’s right,

to seize the day, to plug away.

From Mum I learned to knit and sew and mend

and tend a home, to cook W&S – wait and see –

but not that fruitcake, that was her secret.

From Mum I learned to keep Mum.

From Mum I learned to love a man through everything

and though we love as well

few of us will love so long.

And now from Mum I’ve learned to die,

and when it comes,

I hope I’ll be so calm, so brave, so strong.

Letting light in

under the lichen-garlanded hazel

a space to lie back and look up

through the lattice of buds and branches

waiting their long winter wait

pausing before they erupt into catkins

taking time out                       letting light in

being between ending and beginning