Tuesday, 8 March 2022

International Women's Day 8th March




Women's day also happens to coincide with my mother's birthday. If she were alive she would be 98 today. A few years ago researching the census I discovered her birth place so I took a trip up North.

In Search of Mother

 A journey I could not have taken

Cross-border, Cross-time into a past Best-Forgotten

if not to find the street where you were born

 

In the row of Kirks and Dillons and Hursons and Stewarts

their back yards now a gap, an ache, a yawn

wasteland strewn with tyres and rims and spare parts

Nothing to salvage here of your beginnings.

 

We circled you like electrons, straying

from their nucleus, orbiting their sun

And now nearly two decades on

we still feel the pull and throb of you

even though you’re gone

 Copyright 2022 Cathy Leonard All rights reserved

 

 


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