Toward the Millinerium

I’ve been making hats this week
endlessly snipping, pinning, and
sewing little hats.
With a vague idea of
making money on the side
and even starting a new trend
if I get good enough.
It’s funny but I’d never
imagined myself a milliner.

My daughter said today
- they look like lampshades-
and it occurred to me that
she’s right, they do.
I’d been quite pleased until then,
you know, a new line in creativity
something I could do without having
first been taught.
Natural talent!

But…it’s true
I’m never going to gain renown
by making hats
that look like lampshades.

(c) Liz Willows 2000

A Sense of Place

Higher than my head stray stalks
of unharvested flax seem
to mock me with the spirits
of Kavanagh
and the poets of Ulster
for my Englishness
and therefore lack of soul

I could walk forever
the briar edged road,
with budding daffodil and marsh marigold
waiting for the magic to
slide over my left shoulder
The poet’s birthplace shrieks
PRIVATE - NO ADMITTANCE
in blue & white hostility
as I try to imagine
the window from which
young Patrick pondered
his father’s backside

The Muse is nipping
at my red city
ankles as I curse the formality
of my English tongue
while the Monaghan ranges
hide themselves always
around the next bend of the road

If there were a mountain
in sight I could believe
I were in Keswick then
the poetry of my
schooling would give me
a host of flaming
daffodils instead of the flaxen
ghosts who look into my veins
and see no race memory
of their history.

(c) Liz Willows 2000

A Game for Two Players

Please let's not play Mastermind
or Mstressmind
in bed at 3 a.m. It could be warm
and snuggly here wrapped in each other.

Rapt in each other after love making
I'm too exhausted for questioning
the ethics of why we're here
I know why I'm here

It's my bed and it's bedtime
Sorry - I got the answer wrong again
Why are you here?
Oh - I hadn't realised I'm not allowed

to question the questioner.
Why does sex create so many questions
when I thought it held all the answers?
Pass.


(c) Liz Willows 2000

Would Ogden Nash approve

my telling of how the
seeds of cultivated flowers,
purple anemone, white aubrietia, have
escaped over the garden walls?
Planting themselves in the cracks
of the pavement –
they can’t be tamed.

My heart is this way,
escaping the narrow confines
of what is supposed to be,
loving where it will;
Very Like a Whale.

(c) Liz Willows 2000

Geri

Sixty-two hours before you leave this place
I listen to your spirit struggle
for release. Your breath comes low and fast,
panting. Deep and harsh. You
sound like a mother in labour.

And I see a full moon sailing high above
a Canadian forest, where the she-wolf
lies labouring, bringing you home
into your lupine skin.

The skin you wear now in these last
hours is so fragile. Dry and cracked.
Stretched by steroids and chemo
that ultimately could not hold you here.
Shed off your skin and move on.

I hold you. My life flowing through
the heartbeat in my hands
sharing your death as closely as I can
in love with you, my dyke-mother.

I whisper: Go…there is nothing to fear…
nothing to hold you here…see…the end
of the tunnel where you stand on the ledge?
When you jump you can fly…and when you land
you are born. She who’s heartbeat you hear now
will be there, licking the mucous from your coat.

You hear everything I say,
even though the tumours in your brain
ate through your hearing three weeks ago.

Thirty hours before you leave this place
I find you wide awake. The first time you
have woken in many days. You grip tightly
to both my hands with your own,
fixed eye contact between us –
although your sight left you last week.


Letting go of your hands, the hardest
thing I’ve done to date, I say goodbye
kissing you. Fear rising like a snarl.
I leave you freedom to leap.

(c) Liz Willows 2000

Fragmentation

I sit and
try to write
a poem.
I am a poet.
I am a mother.
I am a sister, a daughter, a carer, a lover.

GET - READY - FOR - BED

The massed amounts
of a day
spent listening to the old.
Listening to The Old Grey Whistle Test.
Trying to like my brother’s favourite music.
Trying to like my brother.

THERE'S A CLEAN NIGHTIE IN YOUR NIGHTIE DRAWER -
PIPPA - STOP THUNDERING...

on the stairs.
The thunder threatened to come
today and
– all we had in common
was our musical taste
especially as his conservative stance
was pure.
Purely done to wind me up.
Yet even while he called me
Greenham Dyke a part
of me was pleased
that he recognised me
before I did.
Perhaps we're not so different.

ARE - YOU - TRYING - TO - DRIVE - ME - CRAZY?

The mood on the poet,
she strives to create art.

BOILED - EGG - AND - TOAST - FINGERS

it used to be battery egg and soldiers
until awareness got the better of me
- and I'll have to wake the baby up
the heat has made him sleep
but perhaps I'll write
the poem later, in a
quiet moment,
as a letter to my brother?

And I never did the washing –
the thunder threatened rain.

Will the poet try again,
awakening in fifteen years or so?
But the muse may
have died by then.

All day I thought
there was a poem.
There was a poem
I wanted.
There was a poem
I wanted to write.


(c) Liz Willows 2000

One Relationship

The 23rd of April
is the anniversary
of Shakespeare’s birth
St. George’s day
Kath Fraser’s birthday
and the day you came to do your washing
at my house.
I know which I think is
most important.

(c) Liz Willows 2000