the sun
f
a
l
l
s
on the windowpane;
the shattering glass
glistens.
sphere bouncing off
again and again
in the replay of that time:
the thump
thump thump
of children’s beating hearts.
we don’t wait for the shout,
we run, paling,
into the leafy dark
where we collide with silence
and each other.
breath escapes,
fear subsides, feet find the ground:
we learn to play football in the dark.
intrinsically, we are all the same: flesh and blood, bones and dust. and when we are born, the world flutters under the weight of us. we are the oxygen of life.
as a woman, it is hard not to feel the nautical beat of potential life swimming somewhere deep down inside, the taut knot tied tight. and only the tide of red flushing the possibility out is a concession of peace, a book falling shut with a gust of wind, oyster shell clamming up. we learn to breathe only for ourselves again.
we are liberated, we are free. from responsibility, from fear, from life, yet unborn, screaming to break out with a pair of lungs not yet formed.
and yet, on the other side of a coin, we are told that once formed, the foreign clump has rights? jeremy hunt and patriarchy. it’s men’s world, just as it ever was. we strive for humanity but religion clouds the eyes. are statistics not enough? what’s humane about bringing an unwanted child into the grim ouskirts of this world?
i grew up in ukraine. the newly independent, drained ukraine of the nineties, worse even than it is today. i was a hotly unticipated child, the following story is not about me. the story is about a friend of my mum’s who said something i will never forget. at christmas, i take my kids to visit an orphanage to see how lucky they are to growing up in a family.
there’s in excess of 100,000 orphans in ukraine even now. 90% of them still have living parents, parents who don’t want to or can’t look after them. at 16, when they leave orphanages, they, more often than not, take to the streets to live the life of crime.
now, i’m not saying abortion is right but if ever i was in a bad position, i’d want to have that second chance, the opportunity to do what’s right and not throw a part of me away onto the scrapheap of life. pro-choice was never just about women, it’s also about the suffering of children born only to be abandoned.
then again, what would you know about that, mr. jeremy hunt, educated at oxford, born to a sir?
sometimes i think i only live inside your blood because i haven’t learnt to live in seperation.
you’ve been saving me so long, you know. and now, how do i tell you that it wasn’t worth it, my love? death will come and get me in the end and it will transpire to you that i was always closer to plath than to anais.
the death instinct shakes the salt out of me, it’s the pearlescent blue of the vein branches; it will reach the heart eventually, it’s always there, diffused in the blood.
i’m always going somewhere, bumping into hurts, renewing my lease on life. and we all know life doesn’t come cheap and death doesn’t come fast for plain janes like us. sometimes i wish to break the mould like sylvia plath, but for now you love me and i’m still tough and sharp like a piece of shattered glass.
i see vendors of big issue on the streets and i wish i could take them all in. as a child, i planned to set up a house where homeless would sleep until they got back on their feet. now, all grown up, i can only smile at such grand dreams and buy the magazine from the kind face smiling at me in the rain.
the world is full of pain.
it’s nights like this, the lonely sort of nights, when bones are aching, theatening to fire spasms into the dark of blood, that peace prevails. it creeps up silently, a stranger, acting swiftly and clumsily, like a child. sometimes it breaks for a moment only to shower you into a steep impenetrable sort of calm; a calm of chilly summer nights far away in oklahoma somewhere, where you’d lay with a straw in your mouth and long grass all around and all you’d see would be stars twinkling up above you.
reading does that to me - the book transports me, holds me, lures me and scares me back to life. i grow upwards and shrink further to the ground with every word, holding my breath as if underwater, sometimes.
it’s the ideas, the words; its everything i cannot do and wish i could. it’s the perfect storytelling of silence, the pictures projected on the retinas of the eyes without the image being there.
it’s brilliant, this magic. so brilliant that in the heart of this throbbing, vivacious city i find myself transported to the loneliest, most tranquil place on earth, as if the skyskrapers have ceased to exist, as if the traffic has stopped its clamouring and honking.
i’ve always thought that without books, life would not be worth living. it is the books we read that chart our life as dreamers, artists, schemers, men.
don’t we all know that the best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men / gang aft agley? but books, they never deviate, they never stray. forever constant, those letters on a page, changing only with the change in our perception.
you taste like peaches,
your ripeness undeterred
by the tight o of my mouth //
it’s the first day of summer
or the last day of spring
or some other time, where the time
is right for falling in love //
and you taste the way a peach does
when it first falls to the ground.
i’ve read and reread this poem many times today. each time it hits you someplace else, somewhere where you don’t quite expect it to. anyhow, read it for yourself, at leisure. read it and let its humid tone set in.
| COMECLOSE AND SLEEPNOW | |
| it is afterwardsand you talk on tiptoe
happy to be part of the darkness |
|
| lips becoming limpa prelude to tiredness.
Comeclose and Sleepnow for in the morning wh en a policeman |
|
| disguised as the suncreeps into the room
and your mother disguised as birds calls from the trees |
|
| you will put on a dress of guiltand shoes with broken high ideals
and refusing coffee r u n alltheway |
|
| h o m e | |
|
Roger McGough |
|
maybe the last few days of reading sylvia plath has made me into a feminist, or maybe i always was one, but this tugs a string to the point of breaking.
this makes me want to run all the way home
and back
into your arms.
thank you for the patience. if you are to be with me, you’ll need it for when the haze wears off and you see the tree as it in winter, cold and barren.
if one had to count the wait, i’d do it for them. 751 days or 2 years and 20 days. you get to pick.
so you’ve made me a woman. it was sometime after 11. i don’t really know, i just know it was five past when i arrived at your door. as i laid in your bed, you took my watch off. time became a blurr of flickering candles, mango scented, in clear pots, and the sun shining through your orange curtains. it was so de vie de boheme.
our bodies were a lovely shade of striking tangerine.
we took the time to read half the instructions in the packet, we cast away the rest: we’d be okay. and yes, we were. one, almost hallucinotary, moment of discomfort and we were there.
we had to move down a few times, just a couple of notches to sratch the first notch onto the bedstead. it was interesting how it fit so snugly, so different to how i imagined. and i’ve thought about it many times.
i decided i wanted a bruise to show for it. but i felt no pain, i was somehow outside of myself. maybe it was god. i think it was god.
how funny that a moment like that should feel so simple, so unexaggerated. maybe i got it from pippa lee, but the more i think, the less i think so. i swallowed that book yesterday, in a gulp, but i’m not sure i like it any more.
tonight, it’s going to be hard, falling asleep alone and dreaming of laying in bed with you.
