CHINA CHIPS
(for my mother)

I remember the day my mother began to die.
She fell from her bed like a child
and remained half paralysed,
her tongue an incoherent mumbling in her head.

I remember it was spring. The kind of day
buds burst in sunlight.
And I remember it took the length of time
for a flower to bloom,
its petals to darken and fall
for her to waste away.

Suddenly I had a desperate need
to know her, to tear into her past
into the earth of her being,
pulling at flowers, searching.
But there was no time to reconcile
my life to hers. I found discarded
fragments of china chips lined
with finger bands of gold, blue as sky.
Matched them to brief narratives
of farms and fruitful labour
and stories of her falling in love;
many times of the night I was born
as heat rustled in the stubble
of wheat on the flat western plains.
She never told me how she'd made love,
whether she'd sweated or moaned on arousal.
Nothing on the points of pain, which must,
at times, have spun her round. With me
she'd not been intimate.

I marvelled at her enduring faith, the habits,
the rosary she had clung to at her bedside.
Now all I knew for certain
as she lay dying,
is that she prayed for me
her image, her dark wild child
for that had always been her way.

BLACK WOMAN OF LONDON

In delicate half light,
Black silhouettes of undressed trees
arch,
towards the manor house of William Wilberforce.

Towards fetters of iron
recast in a trinket box
from a slave set free.

And what is your offering,
black woman of London,
trailing soft winds of the Caribbean
in a Hackney council flat?
Your child whimpers abuse.
Lover strikes,
alternately
a Reggae beat.

How do you cast
irony,
Your vicissitudes?

THE ANSONIA KITCHEN CLOCK
(relic of childhood)

Above the orange-black flickers of the burning stove
the Ansonia clock ticks and with a loosening click,
strikes the hour in my grandmother's kitchen.
Its etched-glass face mirrors scrubbed tables,
blue hued cottage-china and my ailing grandfather
who sips, toothless, at warmth
and sweetened bread and milk.

The kitchen fills with creamy goodness,
bread and mutton, vanilla cakes
and my grandmother presides.
Her scrawny hands move slowly as she slices.
Again the coiled spring of the Ansonia loosens,
the hammer lifts and falls to strike their passing hour.

It is each pose that I remember.
He sits, chain looped across a belly.
She stands, hand light upon the man,
a tight plain smile across her face;
and judging from the flowery backdrop,
it would appear they were
already at the gates of Paradise.

My Ansonia stands on my crowded bookcase.
Stripped of grease and bubbled varnish,
its squared and fretted timber cleanses and warms.
It is not my grandmother's clock,
though the weathered hands move slowly
as the hammer lifts to strike each passing hour.
I lift my eyes expectantly, a child again,
Knowing that outside frost is bleaching the world,
and the house-tank overflow is turning to ice.
It will hang thus, suspended, throughout my lifetime.
What price can one bid for such memories?