Holbeche Road Dreaming

My eldest daughter, Heidi, wrote this poem back in 2009. She only sent it to me recently, saying that she wasn't sure it was "good enough". I have no words to describe how precious it is...

My mother was a girl once.

Her hair plaited in braids,

Bandy-legs below baby-doll hem.

My mother was a girl.

Once she ran the length of the train

In a superman costume.

My mother was not always a mother.

Her womb woke and,

As the plane hung suspended in the impossibility of air,

An egg split, and split.

My mother was a girl in a cornflower dress

As she walked an aisle.

Swelling beneath her bodice.

Her knees still grazed, she played

With the edges of ribboned plaits.

My mother,

Feet swollen with summer and expectation,,

Watched the mare expect her foal.

We made a bower.

We began a conversation in those lonely times

When you rubbed and sang the world.

The beauty of the rising dust:

Her husband returns to ease

Fatalistic claustrophobia.

The sweaty panic of loneliness.

And fear

Of failing,

Rising like funnel-webs

From the hot, Sydney loam.

My mother and her child shared a private world.

They held their secrets as stones at the bottom of dry puddle.

Waiting for rain.

When you held me you found no metamorphosis.

Instead, all those pebble secrets

Turned into the stars.

We wet them with our stories

So that they could guide us.

And they do.

There. Between you and me, we grew each other up.

March, 2009