A significant date

First I must apologise. I have been absent for too long. I have lacked oompfh. My oompfh got up and walked away without a by your leave. Even now it is barely here but I am determined to beat it into submission. I will write. I WILL WRITE.

Okay so, what is significant about this date? Again, first an apology: I should have written this yesterday. Today is the day after the significant date but, nevertheless, I shall persevere.

I re-found writing in my early forties when, with probably misplaced enthusiasm, I took any number of creative writing courses culminating in a Masters’ degree back in 2002. As part of the postgrad course we had a number of guest speakers address us in college. One of them was a poet.

Now let me explain: I am not a poet. I don’t ‘get’ poetry. I have tried and tried but something must be missing from my brain, the bit of the parietal lobe that rejoices in a well-crafted lyrical phrase, for me, must be thinking about other things. Like ‘Why are rhythm and yacht so hard to spell?’

So I was sitting in this poetry lecture wondering how much longer it would go on for, and whether there was anything in the house for dinner, when she, the poet, said something that caught my attention. To explain it I wrote two poems. I call them poems but it’s a very loose description; I really have no idea how bad or good they may be.

Twenty-second of May, 2001
My mother would have been eighty today.
I only realise this sitting in college listening to a reading.
The poet, a tiny American professor, is speaking
of her mother’s seventieth birthday.
I don’t recall the poem.

Earlier the same day my son calls.
His sister has told him to, he says.
She’s worried because I’m sad.

Tangled threads, twisted together.
Meaning and reason
hidden in a knot.

Untitled
After the bubble burst, and a thick red river
flooded the chasms of your mind,
drowning your memories,
you said to me, ‘You’re not Peter, are you?
you look like Peter.’
You forgot my name and left me
With a monochrome. Not knowing.

If you loved Spring and fresh chances
Or dreaded winter with its bitch-cold claws.
Did you still dream of could-have-beens or
glimpse happiness from the upstairs windows of buses?

You loved to garden, I remember that,
to nurture and to tend. To party.
Eighty is worth a party. Tonight
we would have celebrated and I’d have
watched you gathering my children around you,
your eyes showing pride that passed me by.
No hint of past illusions.

If I choose to tread thorny paths,
or return to unlit rooms
will I find out who you were or why I am?
But for now I’ll do as the professor says.
‘Do something with it,’ she says, ‘you must.’

So the significant date? Yesterday would have been my mother’s 100th birthday.