HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY, LADIES

I want to wish a Happy Mother's Day to all my mother friends and all my mother-writer friends, especially. I am hungover - the Group 8 launch last night was a huge success. Loads of people turned out to support us and the exhibition looked fantastic. Report and/or pics anon. So, I intend to spend my Mother's Day doing very little. Looking forward to eating chocolate and reading the papers, taking it easy.

I looked through my poems for a mothery one. The one I'm posting is in my pamphlet Portrait of the Artist with A Red Car and I wrote it before my baby girl was born last year.

Enjoy your Lá 'le Mamaí, ladies!

A Sort of Couvade

There is a distance in me, a removal
from this, my last pregnancy,
few chinks let in the possibility
of a positive coup de grace
to end all the years of strife and faith.

I dream other people’s babies,
ones who refuse to suckle,
so I hand them back to be
cauled in their mother’s love,
but still my baby labours in me,
adding lanugo and vernix
to her cornucopia of miracles,
positing layers of fat
that will insulate her
when she delivers herself to us
in the cool-aired birthing suite,
borne down by my body’s rhythms,
because and in spite of me.

Wrapped in a battle dress of
grease, blood and bruising,
she will wear me like a crown
before forcing through, pulling labia taut,
and I will be present because
that is what I am made for,
I will perform a sort of couvade
at my only daughter’s birth.