Creative writing
Would you like to create a story about caring for your baby which your grandchildren might read one day?
If there was ever a time in life to write a poem or jot down a few words from your heart - either just for yourself, or to give your child when he or she is grown up - this is it! What would you want to tell your child, or your grandchildren and great-grandchildren, about how you cared for your precious baby? What story would you like to tell about the courage of your own weary, loving, sometimes not-so-loving, strong, sometimes fragile-feeling mother's body?
If you are not a writer, what would you draw or paint or create with your hands to tell this story?
Here are a few of my own efforts, in poetry, many years ago.
On the sun-spilled verandah #1
For Emma at ten months and in the Spring of 1991, Brisbane
She pants for my breast, bird-child gaping for milk,
limbs scrambling,
lunges a mouthful, fiercely.
Her cooing tumble of baby-body delights me.
Chuckles bubble from that belly like
water over rocks.
We are drenched
with sprays of milk,
with laughter.
She animal-clings to my
arms and hip: flesh on flesh
then sleeps, sated, fat,
curled into my body, breath
fluttering my skin.
Child, I am home to you
as the sweet honey mountains
the great brown river
that old ironbark
are home to me.
Hot September winds ravish our hair.
And our love flows deep with sweat milk wee
and spit.
Our love is fragrant with the
events of flesh.
On the sun-spilled verandah #2
For Emma, still ten months old, in the Spring of 1991, Brisbane
Clean little animal-eyes
look into me
grinning:
I am here I am here
you adore me I adore me
mirror-eyes dancing
weeping.
Give me she cries give me give me!
I give
(dusty day torrent of currawong
black earth singing the tubers the roots the worms)
without measure: she will know in her bones
it is a bountiful cosmos
this mother.
Drenched
Blue Mountains, Winter 1993
The days wander through me: silent, wet.
Three black cockatoos split the mountain mist.
I want, the toddler says, and we smile.
Nights sprawl with the unhushed sounds
of children milking the breast in long shadows, bed-
caves, butterfly sigh, his baby
hand wandering my belly:
dreams are flesh breath breast.
Was I ever afraid
of a bone-dry
night?
Now I’m drenched by the milk of the
mother.
Purple net
Blue Mountains, Summer 1993
In the purple
net of the hot
wet breasts fat belly round
arms of the mother
waits
the crone:
wiry-veined
fiery old one with the
silent womb and the necessary
word.
Sometimes
I long for her coming.
But my babies are chuckling,
summer is upon us, and bees
hum in the basil.
The photo at the top of this page is of my three-day-old grandson in 2016. The Latin phrase, Monstra te esse Matrem, means “show yourself (to be) a Mother.” It is from a plainsong hymn to the Virgin Mary called “Ave Maris Stella” (“Hail Star of the Sea”), of uncertain origin but dated back at least as far as the ninth century. Traditions of the Virgin derive from much more ancient, pre-Christian cosmologies.