Brave Mother

I want you to come into me, strongly, gently,
As a mother would enter a child's bedroom
And clear up all the toys and tidy the clothes.

'You are old enough, now, to do this for yourself
Stop playing now and get on with your homework'
You say, feeling happy and sad.

Sad to say goodbye to the child,
Happy that the child is refusing to leave, yet

I long to feel your emotion
Approaching and enveloping me

As light fills day, and just once, I am
The little girl and the little boy, safely.

Then I shall put away my toys and clothes, but

From time to time I will forget to tidy my room
And play happily in the warm, unbashful, sunshine.

Summer

You were kind and warm
When I needed kindness and warmth.

You were neither belligerent nor critical
When I needed neither.

You smiled contentedly and your smile
Was content to be a smile.

I needed a gift and to give in proportion,
As the scales of justice measure equality.

Where our eyes met was no battleground.
It was as simple and as complicated as that.

Interface

The razor edges of alps are voices
Across the courtroom tearing the air

The implacable mountains hold jury
But fail to reach a verdict

The sky, neither guilty nor innocent,
Pleads accordingly

The geological chamber resounds
With no evidence

The case, once again, is thrown out.
Meanwhile, between the mountains and the sky,

Small actions unfold and seem true or false
Only in the permanent revolution of the imagination.

I found the edge of the world and survived

One morning I woke, vertical, prominent,
With a thought to visit the horizon.

The waves were streets.
Every stroke of the wind
To my angled sail inclined,
And every fearless footfall
Tackled the blind city road.

I wore courage like a coat,
Armoured against ice, against walls.

I found myself, beyond the horizon,
Safer than before.

I felt no fall from the edge of the world.
Rather: serenity told all.

The sun fell and the stars rose
Over a kind sea.

Turning two o'clock into Booth Street
I found faith and company.

Believing in my own and others' stories,
Healing was to hold.

Holding the teller as she tells,
In armfuls of words we are held.

Stung

How could a dear wasp get the better me?
I'm on a much higher branch of the evolutionary tree.

I tried to flick him dead with a wet T
Towel. Why 'he'?

More demure than a waspette in a wasp,
Or a wannabe, shebehaviour save me
Saviour from the fatal hebeshebes.
Damn the humming tongues of the habdab tree.

'Your sting's a dead giveaway.' said bee.
Undiplomatically.

Maybe wasps are aware of their subtlety
Alighting in intensely lit trees of identity,
In socio-economic contexts buzz-busy,
Droning down the honeycombs of history.

Whirrrrr ... big fat lazy,
Seemed to zoom so low, so sleepily, so s l o w l y.
(The prerogative of all free insects in a democracy).

Though when I considered the striped body,
Pc, the legs, I saw displayed proportionately,
A non-stereotypical immaculate wasp-like bee
With lucent, kingsome, batique wings, spread free,

That stung my pride, triumphantly.

I buzzed with praise, dramatically.

Coda

Wasp awoke one morning from uneasy dreams
And found herself transformed, in her nest,
Into a tiny man.