My Mother Made Me a Cake for My Party

It was shaped and iced 

like a skirt for a princess, 

around an inserted plaster doll. 

She and my aunty spent hours

on painstaking details.

Another, a simple sponge,

had a section cut from the top

filled with dark green jelly, 

dotted with bought ornaments

(lilies, frogs). Easy! 

That was the one we children loved.

The illustration, included according to Fair Use, is by Erté (Romain de Tirtoff). Today in Flash 55 PLUS! at 'imaginary garden with real toads' we are invited to use one of his works as inspiration. This one, 'Costume of the Louis XV period', immediately threw me back into that childhood memory — though the skirt made of cake was more elaborately decorated.

My Upbringing as a Girl

My parents and grandparents, my aunts 

and uncles, and several of my teachers

were progressive thinkers who thought 

that girls, too, could grow up to have careers, 

just in case they never married (in which case

of course they wouldn't – or, more precisely, 

home and motherhood would be the glorious,

totally fulfilling and naturally preferred career) 

but they still believed, those adults of my youth,

unquestioning, that girls couldn't, indeed mustn't

play football, or any of those rough sports, 

because that was what boys did: those critters

who were made of slugs and snails and –

you know how it goes.

(The era was the 1940s.)

This grew out of (1) a discussion, 'Exploring our feminine' inspired by the writing of Brooke Medicine Eagle in Buffalo Woman Comes Singing, and (2) an exercise in Wingbeats, to create a one-sentence poem of 14 lines and at least 100 words.

Linked to The Tuesday Platform for June 20 2017 at 'imaginary garden with real toads'.

The Unforgiveable

Of all the various things for which

I might have withheld forgiveness,

one remains. When we moved house

and that kid helpfully watered 

the garden beds along the low veranda

and also my just unloaded tea-chests of books,

I knew what to do. 'Give me a hammer.'

I was going to claw open the lids

and set the books standing upright, 

pages open to dry. But you were fierce

insisting I must not, while she, 

the mother of the boy, soothed: 

'Just see them safe, undamaged.

Just know they will be all right.'

No matter I begged and cried.

Apart from anything else, 

I couldn't find your damn hammer.

And no-one would help. You all acted

as if I was a foolish, hysterical child.

I don't know why you took that attitude.

Was it because she was pretty; did you 

wish to impress? Was it to spare 

the feelings of the ignorant boy?

You said there was no room

to spread the books to dry – but there was.

We could easily have shifted chairs,

made more space in that vast living-room,

anything – but it had to be done at once.

Of course, when finally I was allowed

to prise the crates open, I was lucky

that only some by then bloomed with mould,

only some had the ink running and blurring

on authors' signatures, only some

were water-swollen out of shape, and only

some were destroyed beyond legibility,

and so beyond keeping. And of those,

not all were irreplaceable. Many I had not

treasured from childhood. Most were not even

expensive volumes in monetary terms.

You never said sorry. I know that you never

let yourself understand why I didn't just

get over it, like a sensible person.

Written in response to Poets United's Midweek Motif ~ Books.

I should add that it was a long time ago (1987) – and since then I have always owned my own hammer!

Refusing a Call

doesn’t happen a lot. Much more often

I leap in feet-first, shouting my delight

as, somewhere, good angels bend and soften

the fabric of reality just right

for me to slip through easily – no fight,

no struggle; only challenge, adventure

enough to say to myself, ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

Poetry, magic, travel, certain men …

I was right to rise to each lovely lure.
If sometimes the end was dark – even then.


('There are some things it is better to begin than to refuse ... even if at the end it should be dark' – J.R.R. Tolkien. One of my favourite quotations.)

My Role in the Circus of Life

Most circus performers

are versatile now. You have to be.

Acrobat and clown, weight-lifter

and juggler, aerialist ...

well, you get the idea. Me,

I'm a little different: between

specialties, not this one plus that, 

but something of all. Or none. 

What I do is – 

                      I jump sideways. 

And the way I do it is to land 

somewhere unexpected, leaving

my audience scratching

its collective head: 'How did ...

why ...?' And I love it!

Not that I do it to shock.

It's just the way I'm made, 
how my freaky synapses work.

Written for Play it Again at 'imaginary garden with real toads', in  response to the prompt: 'Is your life a circus?  If so, which circus performer are you?  Tell me about your act . . . in 90 words or less.' (Mine's the full 90, excluding title.) 

See also Jumping Sideways (memoir material).

In the Land of Flowers

Late, late have I loved Thee, O Beauty most old and yet most new.... Thou didst call and very loud and didst break through my deafness. Thou didst shine and my darkness was scattered. Thou didst touch me and I burned for thy peace.*


In the land of flowers

and buzzing bees,

of berries and ferns

and a lawn like a meadow,

between the black wattle

that spread its thick branches

over the roof of the garage,

and the willow that grew

behind the lattice summerhouse,

I played with my friends.

Most were children like me

only their clothes were different.

(Clothes of bygone eras,

I learned as I grew, 

finding pictures in costume books, 

fancy-dress or historical.)

Everyone else told me

there were no other children,

except for when cousins 

or neighbours came –

I was alone in my garden.

Some of my friends were insects –

spotted ladybirds, gold-striped bees,

tawny butterflies, and fluttery

white cabbage moths which I wasn't

allowed to like because they were pests

(but I did) and beetles with jointed legs.

There were others – bright, quick lights

that flew, and inhabited plants.

They looked like insects, mostly,

to most people, and not like

the pretty, winged fairies in picture-books.

(But sometimes I saw their faces,

so I knew. And there was that day

when one stared back at me

and spoke, mind to mind,

just for a few moments, before –

as they always did – she vanished.)

One of my friends

was a bit like my Grandpa,

but younger and taller.

He and Grandpa both

walked and talked with me

among the ferns and flowers.

They both answered my questions;

both showed me, minutely,

the beauty of insects and grass,

trees and birds and clouds –

but not at the same time.

This wise friend was another

only I could hear and see.

(He never showed me

the mask with the ibis beak.

I found out his name later,

when a seer friend told me

who he saw around me, describing

other details I recognised:

'Oh, him. I know him! He's always 

been here. My old pal.' 

Never, therefore, awed.)

It's a hard thing for a child,

not being believed. 'Tell the truth!'

they say – and you are, but even 

your parents, who promise they love you, 

are sure it must be a story, something 

you made up. They think it's clever. 'What 

a wonderful imagination!' But later

they start to worry. 'She lives too much

in her dreams and fancies. It can't
be healthy.' So I learned 

the habit of keeping secret 

certain things that were real.

I knew even then, without

the words and concepts I have now,

that trees have souls and consciousness,

that every blade of grass 

sparks with Divine fire,

that the earth is alive, that God

is the great Mother – I 

her priestess if she will –

and knew her face, 
evanescent, glimpsed in dream,

flickering in the variety 

of her faceted world,

as exquisite, eternal beauty.


* Words of St Augustine, translated by Helen Waddell and quoted exactly as above in her book on Peter Abelard. (Part of a longer piece of writing, the rest of which she doesn't quote.)


I'm linking this to The Tuesday Platform for July 26 2016 at 'imaginary garden with real toads',

Forewarning

In the dream

I was trying and trying

to call out to you,

I was desperate.

Some force, 

some inexorable fate,

was taking you

further and further away.

In my head I was screaming

your name, but I couldn't

get any sound out, and you

had your back to me,

retreating. You didn't see

my choking struggles,

the despair on my face,

my arm stretching.

Finally I forced out

a stifled gasp, which woke me,

and there you were

lying beside me. 

How many years was that

into our marriage?

Not very long. The kids

were still in primary school.

Even then, I knew

what the dream meant.

When I was in psychotherapy,

the Doc (as we called him

amongst ourselves)

used to ask, when one of the group 

told a frightening dream –

'Who wrote the script?'

But I did get your name out

almost inaudibly. Enough

to wake me, though you stayed asleep.

And of course there was nothing

wrong with my life,

how could there be?

Of course there was nothing wrong

with our marriage.

Some years later,

on another morning,

I woke from a dream 

which I didn't and don't remember – 

only, I brought to consciousness 

the knowledge that I was tied

to an incompatible man

and could not fully be me.

Then a calm voice, not mine,

said inside my head,

'But you won't always be here'.

Immediate peace. 

'Oh, of course not,' I thought.

Later I rationalised: it meant

not here in this moment. We could grow

more together, there was hope.

It took 27 years all told

between our joining and parting.

I still say it was you

who chose to end it.

You insisted it was me.

And perhaps it was –

in a knowing dream, when we 

were still young and blithe.


Linking this to the Tuesday Platform, 3 Jan 2017, at 'imaginary garden with real toads'.

Rapunzel Retold

Walled in

inside the high tower

I find the young woman

('just a girl, really,' 

she was sometimes told)

who dangled her long golden hair

softly over the faces of her babies,

her babies who

with smiles and tiny grabbing fingers

travelled up those strands to gaze in her eyes,

hoisting their brand-new awareness

in through the open window

of mother love.

When then was now, 

she sat in a house on the ground

with not only windows but doors that opened.

And that was fine for many years

while the babies thrived and grew.

How could she know

one was growing wrong?

To her eyes, the traces were faint

mostly invisible.

The thing became apparent

gradually. Even in his youth

and early manhood

she didn't see.

An infection, of sorts, in the brain –

or a chunk of it missing?

She has her ideas by now,

but even now can only guess.

The youngest son in the tales

meets many challenges, no?

Makes amazing journeys.

His were into delusion.

His were into hatred.

Finally, after years of tears,

she performed a ritual of distant healing

for the troubled man who had become

fearful to her, and unknown.

Then she expunged him from her life,

as had many others.

It was not for cruelty that her Sorceress

blocked behind high walls of stone

a long-ago mother playing with her babies,

and that youngest, enchanting child

with his early gifts for drawing and poetry,

his precocious insights, and the smile 

that still, in memory, makes her heart turn over.

I felt there was more for me to explore in the Rapunzel archetype, and sure enough....

Rapunzel Revisited

Part I

Night's my time; it's always been.

In that stillness, all alone,

I find the thoughts that are my own –

not those another mind has given.

Mine is the deep and silent hour.

My parents gave me into care

of another, cruel 'mother'.

We have no blood nor love to share.

She closed me in this Tower.

In the daylight I can see

from my window every tree,

the orchards fruiting merrily

but never to be plucked by me,

the lonely girl with the long gold hair.

I know she does not value me

except as trophy. I can be

her proof of power. And I see

she likes my long gold hair.

She uses them, these long gold locks –

like steps of a ladder, or piled rocks

to climb to my heights. For what she lacks

is her own way to scale the peaks

of thought I reach within this Tower.

She tells me beauty matters, but

my hair's the only claim I've got

to loveliness. 'It won't be cut!'
– my useful, long gold hair.

Part II

As I watched the landscape darken

underneath the moody moon,

I wove from my imagination

ways to travel out, be gone
from the lonely, stony Tower.

And did I let my hair down

for a prince who ventured from the town

and wound my silly heart around

his finger, like my hair?

It's true that I began to long

to join the playful dance and song

I heard so distantly; to throng

with other girls and boys, along

the paths beyond my stone-walled bower.

But it was I who rescued me.

I cut my own locks, breaking free

of her ideas and tyranny.

I left the blighted Tower.

I was not thrown from the window, nor

left out in the wilderness, dirt-poor,

to moan and sigh, and cry some more.

Not I. I marched from the front door,

turned left to town, and breathed the air.

And yes, I met a lovely boy

who fills my heart with lasting joy.

For he is blind, I'm glad to say

to my lack of long gold hair.

(The form is based on Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shalott', whose circumstances were similar.)

Linked to the Tuesday Platform for 20 Dec. 2016, at 'imaginary garden with real toads'.

The Stories of My Life

My life was the fairy-tales

I was brought up on.

Child on a magical island

apart from the ordinary world.

Our vast back lawn

edged with flowering shrubs,

raspberries and loganberries,

a stand of skinny bamboo,

and a clump of curly ferns

with new leaves unrolling like fractals.

Invisible friends, called imaginary

by grown ups who couldn't see.

(Now I know them as nature spirits

and children who had died. Both

liked to come and play with me.)

Sometimes I climbed trees.

Sometimes I thought of myself

as D'Artagnan or Robin Hood.

Cast out into the world to find my way,

bereft of fortune, stripped of privilege. 

Trials and monsters: the mean girls

in the school playground, bullies

who, when I broke away and ran

crying to the teacher, said: 'But we

were just having fun. We thought

she was enjoying the game.'

The real-life wicked stepmother

who tried to feed my little brother and me

mouldy vegetables, bits of broken glass.

(We weren't quite that stupid.) 

Who took the party dress my mother gave me –

pale blue organdie – and sold it for charity.  

The previously wonderful father

who failed to see, and disbelieved.

Rescue!  The house of our aunt,

my own fairy godmother. Her big smile,

her warm, welcoming arms, her wise advice.

The student years. The city. Long nights

writing essays. Study, study, study, 

no money. But - the opening world of the mind.

Shared houses. Jobs. Town Hall dances.

Various charming princes. I chose the one

who turned back into a toad. Party giver,

winer and diner, prize-winning ballroom dancer;

compulsive gambler, pathological liar, heavy drinker, 

prone to black depressions, impotent.

This princess then rescued herself

by means of a full-scale nervous breakdown,

and an adulterous affair. Change of script,

from children's fairy tales to steamy romance. 

The happy ever after was with someone new,

for whom I ditched both husband and lover.

It lasted for 27 years of travels, adventures,

wealth and bankruptcy, while three sons

grew to manhood. Then we ran out

of things in common. Endings. New 

beginnings. Third-time-lucky husband.

The move to a small town in a warm climate.

Happy ever after again, for 20 years, until

it was his time to go. 'Don't leave me!'

I used to beg, and in some ways he hasn't.
I'm always talking to him.

The Book of the Dead holds many

names and recollections. All the parents,

loved and otherwise. All the husbands. 

(They were all loved; not all viable.) 

Some friends. Two of the dearest lovers....

The Book of Life has begun a new chapter,

still being written. I don't yet know the plot, 

or even the outline, but I suspect 

it will be a mystical quest, a saga 

of spiritual adventures, a journey for one.

I have my boots and my sword,

my magic wand, and my light.


Abandoning the attempt to do a series of memoir poems; trying to sum it all up more-or-less metaphorically in one, instead. But this still leaves out a heap of stuff. It's been a longish, eventful life; I think it demands prose. Meanwhile all these long pieces might eventually become a number of shorter poems.

My Life in Words 3. The Long Middle

The long middle of my life

was a novel: one of those 

family sagas. First love, 

first job, first marriage, 

first affair ... and all the rest

in each category.

The first and only

full-scale nervous breakdown 

came early, in that first, young,

brief marriage. 'Compulsive

gambler', I say now, to explain.

And pathological liar, I might add,

and bipolar, and impotent. Or

I could trace the cause further back,

remembering my drunken shrieks 
of wanting to kill my father –

surprising myself most of all.

Years of therapy. Do we ever 

truly recover? I learned to go on

into new chapters, new men,

and the everyday miracle of children. 

School, cooking, travel,

financial planning, all that.

Love in the suburbs.

After some decades, if we're smart,

we give up trying to conform.

We start to honour the self.

I let go of magic, pushed it away

(not to be mad) shut the messages

out of my ears, and the power

out of my hands. Eventually 

stopped remembering.

Poetry, though, would never

let go of me. Words 

have always saved me, 

whether talking my way

out of potential rape, 

or telling myself the truth 

in writing – mining my depths.

Twice divorced, once widowed.

And there was that other, younger

love who died. And one of my sons

permanently estranged. (My choice,

for good and sufficient reason –

are you shocked? Never mind.)

Bankruptcy. Poverty. And finally

the Pension. Learning to be frugal

and live well. Learning all kinds

of competence. Along the way 

the magic poured back – too strong,

too real, to stay suppressed.

My Life in Words 2. Youth

Life was the truck I fell under at 12,

watching the massive tyres

travel inexorably over my leg;

moving my head back out of the way 

just in time – damage, but not annihilation.

It was that unit, my parents, cracking (like my shin).

My scars were from being uprooted,

transplanted far from the enchanted island

into a desert. Monster stepmother –

mad, drunken, jealous – persecuted me

and tortured my little brother,

whom I failed to protect. 'But,' I tell myself,

'I was only 15.' He was 11. 

The adored father proved weak.

The mother and loving stepfather,

back on the island, couldn't believe;

staged no rescue. But at least

we had holidays there: respite.

My brother, now 73, still can't talk about it.

After two years we got away

to the Big City which folded us in, becoming

our dear home town for decades.

University for me, and later for him

(meanwhile new school – our father 

did that much, seeing by then how crucial). 

And our new home in a safe suburb

with my favourite uncle and aunty. 

Her big smile, her welcoming arms. 

I walked straight into them

forever, my 'second mother'.

Later the women's hostel in the city,

then independence: a shared house close to Uni.

Finding again the stepsister who, 

hating her mother, was always my friend. 

Study, study, study, no money.

But when I went home for holidays

back to the island, I was now the glamorous

out-of-towner (mainlander). That was good.