Poetry Editor, Ira Maine, presents two poems today.
I would make the point at the outset here that it is not my intention, even for a second, to compare these poems (in any competitive sense) with each other. It is an acknowledged fact that the primary function of great poetry is to throw light on ‘…the unexamined life..’.
Of equal importance is the realization that poetry is amongst our society’s greatest achievements. It is my own belief that if ‘… all art aspires to the condition of music…’ then poetry represents the written word’s highest aspiration. It is, at it’s finest, the music of dreams.
Besides, it’s a poet’s job, don’t you think, to demonstrate to those who come after, that our civilisation wasn’t entirely a waste of time?.
The first poem is one by the Australian Kate Lilley, who won the Grace Leven Prize for ‘Versary’ in 2002 and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Prize at about the same time.
DRESS CIRCLE. by Kate Lilley
Melodramas are made for mothers.
The daughter thinks that one day
She’ll graduate and take the lead.
Your right hand, little amanuensis,
Eyeing off the competition.
Because I kept your secrets
I thought you were mine to keep.
Now I’m off the hook and at a loss.
Tra la la la la triangle
What’ll I do without you?
END
Here’s a woman having raised her child, who has stood behind her in everything, and now is standing behind her growing child, as she studies, working her way towards university.
They had shared everything, whispered so many secrets over cups of tea to the point where they formed an impossible to break bond… a bond, that if broken, was irreplaceable…yet..
‘…I thought you were mine to keep…’
A terrible sense of loss, knowing that what she wanted was impossible …’
‘…Now I’m off the hook and at a loss…’
The responsibility is gone now, the child no longer dependent, the mother no longer absolutely necessary…
And she remembers a jingle, one of those little tunes she sang to her daughter years ago. She is not trying to recapture the past, only trying to deal with her sense of loss, and remember. The lines, typical of a dandling song, are now heartbreaking;
‘…Tra la la la la triangle
What’ll I do without you?…
END
Seamus Heaney now;
MOTHER OF THE GROOM.
What she remembers
Is his glistening back
In the bath, his small boots
In the ring of boots at her feet.
Hands in her voided lap,
She hears a daughter welcomed.
It’s as if he kicked when lifted
And slipped her soapy hold.
Once soap would ease off
The wedding ring
That’s bedded forever now
In her clapping hand.
END
Heaney makes the years slide past with soap and wedding rings…
‘..It’s as if he kicked when lifted
And slipped her soapy hold…’
Her son has slipped away from her, grown up and now married, but she has her own memories of him, the bath, the tiny boots and somewhere in there, the dandling song.
It is in the nature of Nature to encourage a fierce bond between mother and child. Without this bond children find great difficulty in taking their place in society. Nature demands everything from a mother in order that this might be achieved. This bonding is like no other and is precisely the reason why mothers are so devastated when any or all of their children leave home.
And both mothers, in both poems remember how helpless the child was then and how much they felt driven to love and protect it. This responsibility, this unconditional love, this astonishing closeness, is surely a great part of what mothers remember and mourn forever it’s loss.