Dear Mother come softly across your grey veil
and onto the path in the dark where the snail
is crossing obliquely and nightjars sing sweetly
and put down your toilet bag quietly, discreetly
on the rim of the cemetery fountain. Now wash
your hair free of this mud and these worms, and squash
those white maggots that gleam in your ears,
then smile as you used to. We’ll have no more tears.

*****

Andrew Sclater writes: “I think everyone who loses a parent probably wants to resurrect them somehow. But memory is a false friend. We can’t see them clearly enough: we know, with vagueness, what they were like, but not who they were. We’d like to go back but we can’t, though this poems attempts to. Then, the realisation that we stand alone, orphaned, comes slowly, painfully and (awkward as it is) angrily as we grieve. This poem was delivered almost complete to me. It simply flowed out of the first line in a rare and rather magical way. I still like it more than almost everything I’ve written, placing my discomfort so tidily into its formal box.”

‘Dear Mother’ first appeared in Poetry Review.

Andrew Sclater is a Scottish poet currently living in Paris. He has published poems in Ambit, Best Scottish Poems, The Dark Horse, Magma, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, Shearsman and elsewhere. He co-founded Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine and the National Botanic Garden of Wales. He has been an editor of Charles Darwin’s correspondence and his Dinner at the Blaws-Baxters’ was published in 2016 by HappenStance Press. His newest pamphlet Quite Joyful is from Mariscat Press.

Photo: “.a…d.i.s.t.a.n.t…memory.” by DeeAshley is licensed under CC BY 2.0.