An intimidating title, than only an arrogant fool would attempt to match with a poem! I don't think that I am either a fool (most of the time) or arrogant (some of the time) or at least, when I think about it I try not to be.
This poem grew from the sort of limited free-write that I do after my swim, while I am waiting for my special blend tea to brew. Sometimes the things that I write are no more than banalities, but sometimes something grows from the ordinary words and simple observations.
I feel it might be a sort of repressed sexism in me, but I hate seeing women smoke. I don't like seeing anyone smoke, but women, especially young women, bring out more of a sense of disgust than I can account for.
I have, of course, tried to account for it and I have rationalised it to "a detail of the natural nurturing aspect of maternity and a rooted objection to the perceived 'aping' of the more masculine role of aggressive smoker" - but I think that it comes down, more simply, to a memory of my mother smoking.
I can say that my mother smoked, but, in my imagination I find it impossible to picture her putting a cigarette into her mouth and lighting up. But she did smoke throughout my childhood, only giving up each Lent and then starting again on Easter Sunday! She did eventually and finally give up, succumbing to my constant pleading. But it didn't save her. Which may also explain my loathing of the habit.
So it was watching a young woman smoke, and smoke 'professionally' with that casual dexterity that irritates so much, that provoked the memory of my mother and then seeing my mother in my memory wearing the dress described in the beginning of the poem.
This description develops into a sort of free association of remembered aspects of my early childhood and ends with the realisation that justifies the title.
The last three lines are deeply felt.
Truth
When mum enters my mind
(as she so often does)
she’s always dressed
in that one dress.
The black and white,
with floral print, with
puffed-out sleeves, and
with a texture: Crimplene?
I might be wrong.
It was a summer dress:
of Dogfield Street;
of Dando and Ducu;
of Gladstone Primary School;
of graveyard walking with my Gramp;
of singing in the choir with my own
surplice on a vestry peg;
of the Carnegie Library and its books;
of my first named a/c in Tewkesbury Street PO;
of Penny when a pup on Pendine Sands;
of sight unglazed and broken bones, cut chin;
of crew-cuts and of corner shops;
of Bon Mini and black Ford, second hand;
of running boards,
with mum,
athletic, still,
but always
with bad back
and blood
not right.
And knowing that I knew
two people who
would die for me,
without a second’s thought.
Reality, I’ve nursed
throughout my life.
A never-given gift.
And one that never
can be taken back.
In the same way that I believed that every city had a large park with a boating lake with islands in it and old arcades with interesting shops, just because Cardiff did, I also believed that everyone's experience of family was like mine. It came as a shock, as I grew older and friends confided in me, that their parents did not always behave in the way that mine did. Most people have loving parents, but I know that this is not always true. The poem is a sort of recognition of the "knowing that I knew", the certainty of unconditional love.
