You have a choice.
Like the dandelion
flowering within the edge
of a verge or between pavement slabs,
you have a choice.
Arousal. Finding joy
in life, is not something
someone else can give to you.
You must take it.
Like breathing.
Like the tulips coming
up for air, right here. Right now.
You have a choice.
An electric current swirling
always, through you.
Between you and the cherry blossom
bursting into pink glory.
To live from this bounty,
you have a choice.
Let’s say you find yourself going down to the sea shore each day. Each day you’re there at a different time. At the sea shore, you find the space to let go, to surrender yourself to the moment.
The sea pulls you like a magnet, a magnet you cannot resists or pull away from even if you tried. And you don’t try because you feel as the light touches each crest of wave, rolling them with gold that your soul is fed love.
Let’s say, along the sea shore, you also take off your shoes to get closer. You might feel the damp sand between your toes. You might also feel the cold bitter water tingling your toes. You prefer the warmth yet you move further into the ebb and flow. You allow your ankles to be caressed. You allow your flesh to moan.
Commentary: years ago I wrote a poem titled ‘ i am becoming my mother’. I think it’s in my first full collection Family Album, Flambard Press 2011.
A few weeks ago while attending one of my late night across the Atlantic poetry group workshops, I had an inkling to revisit this poem with the intention of bringing it up to date. To try and incorporate all the ‘Sherees’ that have developed, spored since the first poem, since my mum’s death and teachings have passed into decades gone by.
So I created this piece. Same title but definitely more expansive.
i am becoming my mother
Dehumanising the Black woman. Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, Bitch.
The black woman is seen as one dimensional; the mule of the world, carrying the heavy burden of mothering all others except her own.
Her own children are lost; lost to the auction block, the ocean, the noose.
A Black woman is a source of strength and love. Passing on power as well as pain.
Her body carries stories, carries histories, carries an archive.
as a black woman,
resting deep within the meadow,
held in softness,
grass tickling shins,
dress billowing about
like blossom,
is a political act.
My real name is submerged
laid down layer upon layer,
year upon year.
Yesterday my name was hushed
Like a dark memory hidden from view.
Today my name will be honour
as torch-beam tight recognition begins.
Secretly, I know my name is a subtle ripple
of time passing, making strange the familiar.
a white banner shifts against Nelson’s Column, ‘KEEP BRITAIN WHITE.’
a bright white suspension of unwelcome and hate
ladies and gentlemen with heads turned up as if taking direction from God himself, listen to the message
from a man, on the platform, with Union Jack legs
as if whiteness and rightness runs through him like quickening sap/
the threat is real murmurs through the crowd/ a gathering searching for answers to stop the invasion
let me enter the scene/ from the extreme right/
let me mingle at the back/ near the man in a flat cap
let me feel the heat of the air/
let me sense the crackle of fear in their white, wholesome bodies
my body would be one of those coloured they want to stop
my body would be one of those aliens they want to exterminate
but what they don’t care to know is that this body belongs to a love evangelist
who’s at pains to show them how love can save us all
if only they’d part their ways and let me through
As I mentioned earlier in the month, reading and writing/ writing and reading go hand in hand. As I’ve tasked myself with a poem a day this month, I’ve also tasked myself with reading poetry and wider as it all feeds into the creative process.
Dal Kular, a dear friend and awesome imagineer, brought Foluke Taylor and their writings to my attention. I’ve been taken by Foluke’s writing around creativity and repetition so when Dal mentioned the book, Unruly Therapeutic, I knew I had to pick this book up and read it. And I’m so glad I have done just that ( well still reading it in fact!).
This is a hybrid, break down the structures kind of book in terms of how it’s written but also how it centres the Black woman’s experience. It’s music to my ears on so many levels. More so in being real, and allowing the thoughts and concepts presented to meander. To double back and repeat. There’s even a music playlist at the end go each chapter as an indication of what Foluke was listening to while the book was under construction.
I’ll return here with a review of length, but for now I just wanted to mark the reading of this text and a recommendation to get out and buy your own copy, as I’m not lending mine out!
I think I heard back about my abstract being accepted for Demeter Press collection The Mother Wave: Matricentric Feminism as Theory, Activism, and Practice back in November 2022. And really haven’t engaged much with it since.
I submitted it on a whim off the back of the afterglow from BALTIC exhibition A Country Journal of a Blackwoman( Northumberland).
I wanted to continue this work as I felt as if I’d just got started mining this seam. But really I feel as if I’ve always been working with memory, family and archives throughout my whole creative journey. There’s always been a desire to fill in the gaps around my origins. Who be my people? Where did we come from? What makes us tick?
So I submitted the abstract changing Blackwoman to Black Mothers, as that’s what I’ve been exploring my matrilineage, our bodies with/in nature and healing. I just wanted to continue this through a different medium; before ‘art’ now ‘word’. But really all hybrid.
I’ve surrendered more and more with each creation, that to fully express myself, my identity, ideas, passions and preoccupations, hybridity, multidisciplinary creations/ renditions are a truer take on things. More of a fuller picture/ form is rendered.
My first draft of the essay has to be submitted by May 1st ( now changed to 10 June!). As it happens, I’ve been away house/ dog sitting for the first two weeks of April, alone in Buckinghamshire. Prime time I thought to dive deep and immerse myself in the writing process.
I’ve been using my Patreon supporters as accountability buddies, these past few weeks while working on this essay. I’ve been updating them on progress reports along the away. With my time coming to an end down here, I thought I’d use what time I have left to reflect on the process and progress so far. And I’m sharing the post with you here.
I’m using this reflection as a place marker for progress as well as evidence for when I go home and think I could have done more, or start to beat myself up about wasting time. At least I’ll have this reflection to fall back on.
Each August Bank Holiday weekend,
Notting Hill’s West Indian community
celebrates Caribbean culture. Calypso.
Crates of records. Stacks of speakers.
Reggae, ska, groove, and samba
vibrations of Carnival.
Mid parade, sweaty bodies wining
bodies growing, red stripe flowing.
Pure joy seen as suspicious.
The boys in blue are sent in, in force.
Black batons meet black arms, legs and heads.
Slicing through bodies like cutlass through cane.
Cutdown revellers hauled into hospital
or prison cells. Carnival; a unique
expression of love of self, freedom
and resistance. Therefore it’s spirit
has to be demonised and destroyed.
PC Gumbs, London’s first black policeman
image 09/09/68
My mother says to rub vaseline into my neck
and the collar, to stop the rub; soften the wool.
They say make sure you wear the white bands on your arms,
otherwise they’ll only see ya teeth in the dark.
Only good enough to direct traffic, they roar with laughter.
Brillo pad hair. Toilet set lips.
I say nothing. I recognise the privilege
to wear serve Queen and country.
They say I’m a coconut, sell out, slave
to the white man and Babylon.
They do not spare their vitriol against me.
I survive in the liminal spaces, in the shades of grey.
No one admits the fight has to be from within.
The ranks have to unfiltered by difference.
My mother brought me up on wishes
from velvet green isle;
always with an eye and heart on the other mother.
My birth mother is proud even if this adopted mother
chooses to turn her back, allowing my brothers
in blue to kick the shit out of me too.
Living Wild Studios 