Thursday 23 September 2010

The Winding Paths of Bloggery

Gaw has been writing about his older boy starting school. That led him to take note of a poem. And that led me to remember a poem on a not unrelated theme. It's by Jennifer Maiden, and here it is:

Aptly

In case my love unfits her for the world
I watch her sometimes from peripheries
as if I were the child I was
hovering at each playground's edge
debating dumbly with myself -
how to be a child? She does that
so much better than I did, and
it seems she isn't acting. Good:
if something apt about my love
has made her cleanly real, something
in its half critical yielding, or
its whimsical huge pleasure gives to her
a crispness like my silken tough unpruned
camellia and may bushes which she harvests
to thrust in sugared vases with the air
of one who fits them aptly for the world

5 comments:

  1. I like the ambiguity of 'seems' and 'sugared vases' and 'if' -- the disquiet, the uneasiness of the parent, the fear that the child's apparent confidence is a performance and a transient 'crispness' (brittle word) that might be destroyed when the child is tested by something sharper and harsher than a parent's love (the silken toughness of the flowers is tied to the fact that they are unpruned).

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like the way the mother was hovering at the edge as a child and is at the periphery as a mother, watching her child, wondering how to be a parent?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I do wonder if my mother had such thoughts about me. I sometimes wonder, but suspect that I would never understand a mother's love for her child.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Umbagollah - I had been a bit doubtful about those lines - wondered if the camellia had just been dragged in a bit randomly - but your perceptive comments demonstrate how they are very much part of the whole
    Polly - Helen Garner has an essay about watching her child not being chosen for a team that is heartbreaking; in it she feels she mustn't intervene, although it turns out the child was actually hoping she would
    Madame - love for your child is like all love: complicated.

    ReplyDelete