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  standing at the front gate of our house

  watching me as I skipped a few doors down.

  It was lunchtime.

  I guessed she wanted me to come inside

  though she never spoke

  just watched

  with her expression calm and her lips straight

  and her rounded belly

  in a black zip-up jumper.

  I skipped towards her. She turned

  to go inside. In the hallway her black jumper

  slung on the banister.

  I called out,

  finding her eventually in the back yard

  lugging timber with my father

  and wiping her brow.

  I asked why she’d come out.

  She gave me a look.

  Go and play, will you?

  So I went back outside in a slight daze

  which stuck around

  for a good twenty-five years

  though I think now I get that this is what

  a mother becomes sooner or later –

  an entity inhabiting my language

  my shade of lipstick

  and the way I have suddenly started

  to eat foods well past their best-before

  and when I see my daughter fingering out notes

  on our piano and I make yet another to-do list

  I realise

  my mother has possessed us both

  despite sitting here quite corporeally

  trying to read poetry.

  To a Zoopraxiscope

  Two hours

  A halo of white down (its provenance has us thrown),

  her pearlish face a thrift of flesh-pleats, skin sheened gold

  as the liver orchestrates production and flow

  of new blood. I do not hold her but gather her

  many loose and still parts, puppetry of new motherhood.

  How the angles of her remain womb-curved.

  She is so small, so still, but like

  a plane’s propeller appears the same whether stopped

  or spinning, industry of survival

  within the bones, brain, blood, forces beyond me

  invoke her, again and again, to this foreign

  place, chiming human notes

  in her body’s clear bell.

  Thirteen months

  Some inner light comes on when she sees me,

  her whole face a smile, she squirms out of whoever’s

  arms hold her to patter drunkenly

  across the room to me. I scoop her up,

  kiss where gosling floss flicks

  from the velvet arc of her nape. I have held her

  like this a thousand times and yet

  I am still pressed to find language

  and music to express her, for she is a poem,

  all matronly arms, cherubic thighs

  with their bread-like bends, bright galaxies

  of her personality. Daily she garlands me in moments

  I want to press, etch, clutch forever.

  She is a wish, then, whispered and let go,

  racing for the open stair.

  Six years

  Tall for her age, she has lost two teeth,

  is willing a third to topple.

  Her skin flesh-porcelain, salted with freckles.

  Hold my old school photograph next to hers

  and you’d think we were twins, down to the

  ancestral blue of her eyes, the muscle

  of caramel hair by her waist.

  I plait it, she tells me she’d like an old-style

  typewriter for her birthday next month.

  Her next book is all planned out.

  Can I buy her tomatoes today,

  can we bake a cake later, can she have

  a spooky theme for her next birthday party?

  My diary is fat with her schedule,

  my abdomen rivered with scars from her,

  my head heavy from waking

  to soothe her in the night, strip her sheets.

  Yet I count these as gifts.

  Each day she drifts deeper

  into the belly of the world, my memories of her

  infancy flickering, shadows in a zoopraxiscope.

  Her memories of childhood are just beginning

  to sketch her womanhood. The dark

  already lengthening behind each chiming wish.

  What Matters

  She was three, the beach was packed,

  she was right there one minute and then

  she was gone.

  I pleaded with people,

  described her,

  we scanned the glass sea,

  shouted across the parasols, her sister

  on my hip,

  each second felt like it was bleeding from me,

  I flailed in unknowing –

  this child about whom I knew everything,

  how she had to be held to fall asleep,

  how she loved to hide in cupboards, her fondness for horses,

  I knew everything

  except where she was.

  I prayed angrily, fearfully,

  I was at a cosmological juncture,

  all matter had atomized to this one truth:

  if we did not find her how could I live?

  For ten infinite minutes

  she was either drowned or stolen

  until a coastguard ambled across the lashed white sands

  with her at his side, unperturbed

  in her pink polka dot vest,

  her fine brown hair in a plait.

  I started to cry, we took her

  and clasped her between us

  like a seam.

  For days afterwards

  I found myself staring at her, and when she climbed

  into our bed at night I held her tight,

  I did not fuss when she wouldn’t eat her veg,

  I was OK when she wouldn’t go to bed.

  And when I feel I have failed, failed utterly,

  when I open a bill I cannot pay,

  when the choirs of my worry commence

  their dark concert

  I see myself on that beach

  still calling her name,

  still calling her name.

  Children of the Bullied

  They are well warned.

  First day of school:

  hold yourself like this,

  yes, shoulders square.

  They know what ‘confident’

  and ‘assertive’ mean

  long before the others.

  Taught to negotiate

  friendship’s fickle maze,

  their chums varied, many.

  Sometimes you can spy them

  rolling their eyes, wincing

  at a kiss from their anxious

  parents, to whom they are

  so brave, so unlike them

  entering that battlefield.

  Sleep Training

  Months after the glass crashed

  to the floor – after I’d swept,

  vacuumed, got down on all fours

  and kissed sticky tape to the

  unseen shards – a single

  sliver suspended in lesser light.

  Years on, often at night, the sight of her

  small searching hand

  through the stair gate

  at her door, the sound of her cries

  fresh as tree-clung fruit,

  sharp as just-dropped glass.

  Instrument

  We took you to the beach

  scooped a paper tray of sand,

  lowered a magnet towards

  the bed of it – blips bloomed fast

  on the magnet’s lip

  rose and pewter burr of metallic crumbs that nested,

  unseen, amongst the silt,

  the way motherhood

  has drawn out my failings, fished out my flaws.

  Sometimes I hold these to your light,

  imagine the stubble
of them gathered

  and forged by love’s flame to stronger metal,

  a yet more useful tool.

  Planet

  It is the tragedy of childhood

  that they do not know how much I love them –

  my shining boy with his four-year-old need to make me proud,

  my baby girl – plumpness, sunshine, all quest and zest,

  my two year old – soft warm ivy around me at midnight,

  a garden of language blooming daily in her mouth,

  and my eldest – beautiful dance of sand and light, mirror

  drinking all of me in and throwing all of me back.

  They hear it daily, I love you, I love you,

  they know my heart

  has grown ears and eyes for them,

  has its own arms

  to carry their hurts,

  would walk out of my own flesh for them.

  But their knowledge is wanting.

  They have yet to find measure for this love, genus, potestas,

  though they move in it, though it stretches over and under them

  like a planet they tread upon, breathing its air,

  sleeping through all its watchful nights.

  Honour Thy Parents

  Honour thy father and thy mother

  for they have spent the waning flame

  of their youth failing

  to get you to sleep; long hours by your bed,

  singing, pleading. It was not

  what they imagined parenthood would be like.

  Honour them

  for they have had to figure you out

  like a trillion-piece jigsaw

  that changed each time

  they spied the beginnings of a picture.

  Honour them for sparing you,

  for fumbling and fretting, dressing and undressing

  the foreign shrieking creature you once were

  lest you grew too cold, too hot,

  these imperfect beings

  who confronted their complete dearth of knowledge

  at first sight of you,

  new and unbearably slight,

  they resolved henceforth to do everything

  right – honour them

  for enduring vagaries and catalogues of advice,

  most of it wrong,

  for swallowing judgments dealt by strangers

  during your many epic meltdowns.

  No doubt there were times

  you pushed them to some barren edge of love,

  embarrassments, harassments of other

  children in the park, or when you called them names

  in public – fool! Dirty poo-face!

  O honour them!

  who carried their dreams through your childhood

  like beads in a ripped sack,

  they were doing their best; understand they were

  their own parents’ children – honour them

  for they must live with their mistakes,

  honour them, which is to say

  be all that they were not and do all

  they could not, and so honour

  your life. And if you find

  you can neither forgive nor see in them

  the good, the God, or the once unblemished child

  think on this –

  parenthood is the universal curse

  of becoming or overcoming

  our parents

  for better or for worse –

  and honour them.

  My Father’s Mother

  When I think of her I see smoke

  looping from the ashtray

  like a silver-white spring giving up its bounce, I see

  crime novels

  piled by the bedside and although I was not there,

  I see the scene she recounted to my mother in hushed tones

  many weeks after the fact – my grandfather

  pouring hot tea in her lap.

  When I think of her I hear

  the plaintive tune of that soap opera she clung to –

  still, I cannot bear the sound – I hear

  the premature rasp in her voice and the yap

  of that infernal dog and most of all I hear

  silence, canyons in the things she said

  like the night my mother brought me, an infant,

  to her house after my father beat her

  and my grandmother said, yes she said it –

  in my day when you made your bed you lay in it.

  I can tell you there is none of the woman I knew

  in that statement, there is

  bitterness and echoes

  of what she must have been told

  in her youth

  you make your bed, you lie in it –

  a hinge, a tidal force, a false gravity

  that made her marry him, forgive him, endure him,

  even when he lifted the hot cup and poured it,

  poured it all

  in my grandmother’s lap.

  Puppy

  There was this childhood that thought it was a puppy.

  It followed me around everywhere, whimpering

  and begging to be fed.

  It was a puppy, yes, but a terribly ugly puppy.

  It was riddled with all sorts of repulsive diseases.

  The vet said the diseases were treatable. I said

  I was sick of it hanging around. I’d lost friends and lovers

  because of it. Made all sorts of wrong career moves

  and impulse buys. I didn’t mention the nightmares.

  She told me I had two options.

  One was an injection from which the puppy wouldn’t wake.

  The other was a kennel where, perhaps in time, someone else

  would take pity on it, take it home, groom it up into

  a fine dog.

  This childhood that thought it was a puppy

  howled as I walked from the iron bars. I didn’t look back.

  Sometimes still I wake to find drool on my face and paw prints

  up and down my bed.

  Breaking My Father

  I would be hard pushed to recall the details

  of last week or even the events of yesterday

  but I can tell you that I was five years old

  and it was seven o’clock on a Thursday evening

  when I broke my father.

  My mother was out,

  we were alone and it was given that each week

  on this day I was allowed to stay up

  an extra half hour to watch Top of the Pops –

  but he decided that this should not be so, I should

  go to bed, and maybe I was not yet thickened

  in the smear of battery or too young to cow

  to his threats but either way I refused, I clenched

  my fists and yelled for my life as he dragged me

  upstairs and when we reached my bedroom I would not

  go in, no I would not do as he said.

  Suddenly he dropped

  to his knees before me, his face a broken window

  and I see him, I still see him reach out blindly,

  penitent, as though greeting the longed-for dead, pulling

  me to him and holding me tight, both of us

  toppling to the ground as if bound by rope

  and him sobbing and sobbing. I remember thinking

  that I was too hot and couldn’t breathe,

  but he just held on tight

  saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  There is no other time

  in my life that he did this, this act of extravagant

  penance, submitting, revealing tenderness.

  And perhaps this was the difference between us,

  the reason he passed on the dark cup of abuse

  and I did not – my father had never witnessed the splinter

  in his assaulter’s mask, a break in the fire

  to tell him there was something human there,

  that there w
as merely a man behind all that hatred,

  all that fear, just a man, a man full of need

  to be broken by a child.

  Still Life, With Family

  A pear of candlelight

  wagging on the mantelpiece,

  the baby chewing the chewable end of a watergun,

  drips from our son’s last water fight

  mouthing rain’s sibilations.

  You trying to fix my computer,

  surfacing every now and then

  with considered diagnoses,

  our other daughters eating pancakes,

  a nothingness on the TV. No one is shouting,

  no thundercloud of cigarette smoke,

  no threat of anyone bleeding

  or being bruised. No one will take their life

  in their daughter’s bed.

  Belfast Murmuration

  No healing without grace

  No healing without first being broken

  the way one bird shatters into thousands

  starlings

  black seeds

  thrown up from Victoria Bridge

  against a purpling sky

  It could be chaos

  instead the bird-turned-thousand

  coils

  twizzles

  mosaics

  then heals together

  in waves,

  net gathering

  pieces of sky

  or a flung rug of bird

  deciding what else it could be –

  a tunnel

  a tree, accelerated

  a continent

  or perhaps a word

  All the alternatives to brokenness

  offered by grace

  The Fourth Child

  Let me tell you about the fourth child.

  To some the fourth child is a curiosity

  akin to Indonesian hobbits

  a diamond exoplanet

  or deep sea crabs going about their business

  in seven-hundred-degree waters.The fourth child

  is somewhat hard to accept, like a sudden proof of God

  or the invention of an eighth day

  an appendage that unbalances how the universe appears to sway

  and thus the fourth child begs a reasonable explanation

  which crosses all levels of socio-economic and metaphysical

  sense – conceived straight after Armageddon

  was declared on the ten o’clock news, or,

  umbrella for all sins: a mistake.

  This is despite the fact that twenty-odd years ago

  a four-kid-family was neither blinked at nor considered

  any more outlandish than eight people in a car

  designed for five. Perhaps it is for these reasons that