Belfast Murmuration
.
No healing without grace
.
.
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No healing without first being broken
.
.
.
.
the way one bird shatters into thousands
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.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . starlings
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.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . black seeds
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . thrown up from Victoria Bridge
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against a purpling sky
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It could be chaos
.
instead the bird-turned-thousand
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . coils
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . and
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . twizzles
.
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . mosaics
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . then
.
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . sutures
.
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . net gathering
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pieces of sky
.
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or a flung rug of bird
.
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deciding what else it could be –
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . a tunnel
.
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . a tree, accelerated
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. . . . . . . .a continent
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . or perhaps a word
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .All the alternatives to brokenness
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . offered by grace
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
globing on the sofa.
You trying to fix my computer,
surfacing every now and then
with considered diagnoses of the problem,
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.
The day pressed against the window
like a wanting child.
Now That I Have Daughters
Don’t get me wrong, I was always a feminist.
How could I be otherwise?
But now I’m raising daughters it all seems to leap out at me,
and by it I mean the twelve-foot murals at the fairground
of women: breasts bulging, thighs narrow, backs arched, red pouts.
I’m sure I always noticed them but now,
as I take my girls on those rides, I am angry because
a spin in a pink mouse-themed cup subjects them to a message
of womanhood as coterminous with sex and subservience
and a pervasive annihilation of their true power,
true beauty of the female edited out by capitalist ink.
And it’s there when I wheel the pushchair into a newsagent’s
and dash out again, for at my four-year-old’s eye level
magazines flash those same bimbo-fied babes, naked, slicked,
twisted in poses of the seductress,
the same on billboards or posters for alcopops, movies, apps –
anything to trade the masculine as dominant, as master. My oldest
brushes the hair of her princess dolls, wears a tiara
and writes little stories about becoming a princess,
and this I don’t mind. We talk about
what a princess represents, her qualities
of self-worth, integrity, what femininity really is.
Then she asks me to read one of her fairy tale books,
but I cringe at the self-sacrificing narratives of female-as-
secondary, as helpless – and one day I can’t stop myself,
I pull out all her books and discard the ones
I cannot bring myself to narrate. Yes,
I may have become a curmudgeon.
I may well be over-protecting, censoring, radical.
But I say if I must raise my girls in a world where rape
is joked about, warfare, legal,
where a child my daughter’s age will be forced to marry,
where a woman will be put in prison for reporting a rape,
where a mother will be thrown off a bus for breastfeeding,
where the press will vilify a woman for not losing baby weight
and applaud a man for misogyny,
then I will raise my girls by teaching them that they are awesome,
they are daughters of the divine, that their femininity is sacred.
And I say take back your messages of harm and woman-as-
nothingness, take your whispers toward me in my raincoat
pushing the buggy, take back the qualifier
in that disgusting phrase, just-a-mother.
I say, these are my daughters, they are glorious, they are precious,
and they know their worth.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .I say, watch out.
These are the women of tomorrow’s world.
In the Hands of an Orange Sun
At dawn I stirred in the hands of an orange sun.
My dreams were chained, my children still young.
We journeyed down winding lanes that had burned
at dawn. Now ice stirred in the hands of an orange sun
and my daughters had had daughters. My son spurned
his train sets for coal and wrench, became a man
at dawn. I stirred in the sands of an orange sun.
My dreams were changed: my children, still young.
What we talk about when we talk about motherhood
which reminds me that it didn’t happen
overnight but very gradually and subtly
my mind keened away from the catalogue
of thoughts which had sat in it snug as eggs
in a nest for almost thirty years to a shore
of thoughts about every possible topic
that involved babies and mothering
. . . . . . .I found myself in deep earnest conversation
with nameless women in libraries and parks
and airport queues and at the supermarket
while searching for the cheapest baked beans,
we’d never share our names but we’d share
our experiences of teething and weaning and
being late for everything and sleep training
precisely because it was like free-hand climbing
the tallest red rock face in Utah the only human
for miles and randomly coming across another
similarly occupied hominid but then it was
more than that, it was a kind of baptism
in the middle of the Pacific
. . . . . . .rolling up on a strange and
lonely and astoundingly beautiful island and
making new friends with the others
who staggered up the beach, their arms full
with this new life, and it was more than who
I made friends with and it was more than
the way my shopping trolley saw fewer
ready meals and more organic produce
and it was more than anything I can yet describe
but it began with my thoughts which keened
towards topics my former self would have labeled
‘boring’ but which now possessed me
and when I say I was thinking endlessly about
how exactly to prepare six bottles in one go
and whether she should be starting to sit up
by now and whether I should give in and let
him sleep in our bed or persist with the cot
I was not thinking about any of this at all
but feminism, about the government,
about Africa, about astronomy, about history,
about nature, creativity, about God.
All Right
A mother’s life
. . . . . . .lived out on a ship
enormous planetary ship
. . . . . . .that sways and is never still
and so she appears
. . . . . . .to be staggering
slip-sliding between
. . . . . . .opposites of time,
love, logistics, existential
. . . . . . .and wholly complicated dilemmas
such as whether she is
. . . . . . .wasting her life at the sink
or if she is in fact the wisest person alive
. . . . . . .spending her days tending
to such small details of living
. . . . . . .if she is doing it right
and by ‘it’, everything
. . . . . . .if her children deserve better
than her
. . . . . . .if she should have had more children
if she should have had them
. . . . . . .earlier, closer
if she should have had
. . . . . . .any at all
if she should have kept on
. . . . . . .powering at her career
basked in the kind of recognition
. . . . . . .and fabulous shoes
success would have brought
. . . . . . .if, on her deathbed, the questions
she spends each moment of each day
. . . . . . .shifting in her mind –
between the forests and lakes
. . . . . . .between Asia and Africa
between all the townships
. . . . . . .of her love –
will ever be answered
. . . . . . .if a voice, a descending peace
will finally reply
. . . . . . .yes, my dear, you did it all
one hundred per cent right
Carolyn Jess-Cooke is a poet and novelist from Northern Ireland. She has won numerous prizes for her work, and her fiction has been published in 22 languages and was reviewed in the New York Times. Her new poetry collection BOOM! (Seren, 2014) recently received a Northern Promise Award and is about motherhood. You may watch the book trailer for her novel, The Boy Who Could See Demons, on YouTube
–Art by Sarah Hardy
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