A rainy day

“Everyone’s heard of Carol Ann Duffy!” my daughter said to me. “Well, ok, so some of us have come to discover her later in life”. Rather late than to never experience the pleasure of her simple eloquent words. Her tapestry of everyday life as I read “Mrs Schofield’s GCSE” bringing a simile to my face as my son prepares for his school exams “.....Nothing will come of nothing: speak again. Said by which King? You may begin.”

And in “Mean Time” when the clocks go back an hour I know too my time is stolen.

And of course, because of who I am, I read “Foreign” and I know “Inarticulate, because this is not your home, you point at fruit. Imagine that one of you says Me not know what these people mean. If like they only go to bed and dream. Imagine that”. And often it is not I that points but others who have come to my new homeland too.

I have two of her books on my lap, “Selected Poems “and “The Beas” .

And I’m drawn to many and to two because the time will come when I shall mourn.

Water by Carol Ann Duffy

Your last word was water,

which I poured in a hospice plastic cup, held

to your lips – your small sip, half‐smile, sigh –

then, in the chair beside you,

fell asleep.

Fell asleep for three lost hours,

only to waken, thirsty, hear then see

a magpie warn in a bush outside –

dawn so soon – and swallow from your still‐full cup.

Water. The times I’d call as a child

for a drink, till you’d come, sit on the edge

of the bed in the dark, holding my hand,

just as we held hands now and you died.

A good last word.

Nights since I’ve cried, but gone

to my own child’s side with a drink, watched

her gulp it down then sleep. Water.

What a mother brings

through darkness still

to her parched daughter.

Cold by Carol Ann Duffy

It felt so cold, the snowball which wept in my hands,

and when I rolled it along in the snow, it grew

till I could sit on it, looking back at the house,

where it was cold when I woke in my room, the windows

blind with ice, my breath undressing itself on the air.

Cold, too, embracing the torso of snow which I lifted up

in my arms to build a snowman, my toes, burning, cold

in my winter boots; my mother’s voice calling me in

from the cold. And her hands were cold from peeling

then dipping potatoes into a bowl, stopping to cup

her daughter’s face, a kiss for both cold cheeks, my cold nose.

But nothing so cold as the February night I opened the door

in the Chapel of Rest where my mother lay, neither young, nor old,

where my lips, returning her kiss to her brow, knew the meaning of cold.