In the interests of simplicity, from now on I shall be blogging on my website: http://mandyhaggith.worldforests.org/blog.asp
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Tuesday 29 March 2016
Saturday 30 January 2016
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