She’s my mother

here or even on a large hoarding

I could rent for a week by the train station.

She gave me my blue eyes and my love of stories

and tolerated the fact that, I like my dad I would learn

for the sake of it and not with a view to earning money.

She praised my sense of colour though not my three-year research

scholarship to a place of higher learning

would rather I curled my hair and smiled a little at boys.

But my destiny was determined by the fact that I never could

master that Singer sewing machine she had

so I had to learn Theoretical Physics to make up for it.

And here I am now,thinking of her homemade bread

her showing me how to read music

and the names of the keys on the piano.

I know I was a big disappointment in not marrying into money

or becoming a saint or virgin and martyr ,well martyr anyway

She always believed me to be a virgin, even after marriage;

and it’s true I was a virgin with regard to common sense

getting on in society and all related issues.

Some ordinary female knowledge never penetrated me

so I’d sit in the rain wondering what tolerance was

or how Pascal got to lie in bed so much,and whether I could too

because I got creative ideas in bed—

not what you may be thinking of—–

She always changed the sheets and washed our clothes, however, short of money we were…

And made us dresses from scraps of fabric

That’s how we learned geometry,with the trapeze dress……

Numbers we learned from the stars and excitement from playing with the boys in that old brickfield.where they went into kilns

Strange what makes us who we are,but

the biggest contribution comes from mothers

and just to please her I hope as well as all my academic success

one day I’ll make myself a dress out of some rare print

embodying simultaneously both male and female design and shape

And she’ll look down and say,

She always had her head in the clouds,in a book,in the smoke

patterns from Dad’s cigarettes, in a dream and a whirl,in a puzzle

but she did have a good sense of color.

Yeah,she is my daughter

Yeah,once I imagined I must be adopted but

Yeah.I’m her daughter.

She’s my mother.

My mother