Penni, I am glad you enjoyed the poems. They are really women's poems, and I hope the men around here were not too bored with my birthday indulgence. A family of two again? Yes, I am going through the same things, trying to see what that will be like. A lot better than a family of one, I would think! The whole teenaged years for children are sort of a tentative mapping out for their parents of what the rest of their lives will be like. I have found, amazingly, that I am not always sad when my child is gone, though. We watch grown-up movies, rustle around antique stores, go for walks that have a different tenor than the quick, energetic ones with children along. It is definitely enough time to work on making a marriage richer, stronger, more companionable.
You know, Penni, in Northern Ireland I think love is much more generally restrained than it is in America, probably because of the religious influences. What Monica allegedly did to Billy is not even part of the repertoire of lovemaking, although perhaps that is very gradually changing. From the picture of Angela Greene on the cover of her poetry book, "Silence and the Blue Night", she looks like she is in her sixties now. The biographical blurb says that she lives with her husband and children in Drogheda, but I think in her generation the most romantic part of the relationship was over in a flash as child after child came. Perhaps in earlier works she wrote about love, but this poem with the very brief tale of the intensity of young romance is all that I found in this volume, except for a poem about a terrorist's wife, who tastes murder in her husband's mouth when she kisses him. It is a little hard to tell what is autobiographical in poetry! I think, though, that Greene is dealing with more ancient rhythms of life than the ones we can dicker with and slow down because of the advances of modern birth control:
Destiny
Then her eyelids were the damson's bloom
and her cheeks were ripe.
Then her hair flossed umber shadows
down the sweep of her creamy nape,
and the tips of her lively hands shone
like peeled almonds.
Her blue dress and her snowy apron were crisp
and she sang as she worked,
deftly patient with those in her charge.
Then she got married, and in that free
and giddy twenties way
she sat astride their first motorbike.
Where apple blossom pollened the lanes
they tumbled their burning kisses
into waves of cool grass.
Then pregnant, again and again
her breasts
were the moist cambric of the midnight hours.
She rose early. To bake bread
and to launder by oil light;
or pulling the blinds for the sun's warm splash,
she worked
till those folded nights blotted her damp skin.
I was happy one day close in her milky scent
when he came home early;
my father, and the midwife in her navy coat,
and those soft eyes nudged me outdoors.
Through the clear glass, when I stood on tiptoe,
I saw her thighs
heaped like bruised poppies onto the white sheet.
I shush by that April window
till, in its searchings, her voice finds me out.
Its thin cries pierce me.
They sift down my blood like blown seed
from somewhere
far off. |
