Nature and Nurture, a poem about parents and children

"The thoughtlessness, carelessness and cocksureness with which children are brought up is frightful to see: and yet everyone is essentially what they are to be when they are ten years old; and yet one would find that almost every one bears with them a defect from their childhood, which they do not overcome even in their seventieth year ..."

Kierkegaard, The Journals

Plasticine

My plasticine baby,

You have properties, chemical and physical,

Self –contained: the essence of what you are.

And in the sky there is your very own star -

Should anyone care to look for the mystical.

But plasticine is what you are: face fair,

Soft as putty, and you can be moulded,

Swaddled, coddled, groomed and folded, 

Shaped even by our very breath of air

That oh so gently presses in on your skin.

And you coo and we coo back to you.

Our voices are your echo, listen, listen.

We watch and our watching presses too.

Your love is blank, but we’ll fill it in

For you; cross the t’s and dot the i’s;

Tick the boxes for all that applies,

Make multiple choices, carbon copies, sign.

We wait and our waiting bears a weight;

Our thinking will become your thought,

A soft pushing this way and that:

We’ll make you square, or round or flat.

And our fingers, clumsy with wanting,

Might squeeze a shape misshapen in us;

And you’ll be a question, a puzzle, a rebus,

A conundrum beyond answering or solving.

So one day you too may feel misshapen,

As if parts of you are not you,

And the you you thought would happen

Will always be out of true.

And you thinking that’s what you are,

And you thinking you were made that way,

Crammed into the kiln and baked in clay,

Put onto the stage and told to star;

The mould cast, the role not chosen,

The shape pressed, and the lines written,

And what can you add but some flaws

And fluffs of your own? Effects a cause?

You’ll think you can escape the nurture,

Then find yourself twisted like a helix,

Find the faults we had secreted into the mix:

Do Not Admit that this is in your nature!

Oh, my plasticine baby,

Soft dough, kneaded with love and lust,

Baked in the hot oven of your mother’s womb,

Rising with the yeast of me, then dusted

With sugar, sweetened, ready for home;

And you’re a crusty loaf on a silver salver;

A cake, a confection, to be cut and sliced;

And we’ll all want a share, a piece, a bite.

The mouth waters, fills with saliva.

We’re gonna eat you up and spit you out.

The taste is obscene; you’re plasticine.

click here to watch the film on youtube

A childhood poem, The Beauty of it

             

             

What we learn of life as children is absorbed one way or another, and then it seeps into our being,both consciously and unconsciously as we get older.  Sometimes we are aware when young of what we perceive to be wrong, not just childishly unfair but actually wrong; a small outrage to a morality we cannot define. This may, perhaps, enable us in later life to prevent its reoccurence in our own behaviour.  Not pass the baton on, for if we do, what we have and what we give is a life less lived.

The Beauty of it (continued)

A six-year-old walks a line

That may or may not exist,

Always teetering on the edge

Of ordinary temptation, nothing original,

Over a safety net sensed by instinct.

The fall brings knowledge,

Something not seen from above –

Not a test you were born to fail,

Nor an impulse you could never resist –

That being caught is a kind of love.

Not being caught is not knowing.

You can spend your life falling.

It’s not much of a life –

A life less lived.

Made to stand in the hall,

And told to strip,

His fingers fumble at button and zip –

Undoing himself – his body rocks;

His mind’s seismograph has stalled,

Cannot measure, has no scale -

The piss leaking from his toy cock

Puddles shame and fear on the floor.

He bends for the strap;

Then the shock tautens his frame,

And something gives, rips, snaps …

(“Catch me!”  She closes her eyes, drops…)

Flaps raggedly in the wind,

A twist of cloth caught on a fence crossed:

Something snagged, lost, left behind -

A hole around which his life is stitched.

His daughter picks at the threads;

Sews kisses, offers insteads.

Arms and legs wrapped around tight,

She whispers in his ear, “I knew you would.”

Still he wonders if he could,

And for how long he’ll bear the weight.

But the blue blue sky is a blanket.

Isn’t that the beauty of it?

Childhood poem, The beauty of it

And somewhere in the dark atlas of the mind Is the conceit in the relief of a journey that is signed.

Neither poetry nor memory is about the truth.

Welcome to this blog.  Within it, over the following weeks, I want to present a collection of poetry: Dark Atlas. The title comes from a poem within the collection. But I want  to start by looking at childhood and two earlier poems I wrote.

"Pieces", a prologue. Memory is a haphazard and sometimes unreliable 'search engine', unable, mostly, to retrieve fully formed narratives or pictures.

"The Beauty of It". Writing, I've found, has it's own agenda and if a piece is prompted by a memory, a feeling, something autobiographical, this is soon taken over by the 'life' of the writing, forming itself out of itself.

So a childood is good place to begin, part-remembered, part apocryphal, perhaps mine, probably somebody's.

Pieces

Life is made up of

Pieces of life:

It’s something dropped,

The whole finally

Irretrievable.

The beauty of it. (A Piece)

He crossed the road on his bike.

Was the car too close,

Did the horn blare,

The car skid and brake?

He doesn’t remember.

He doesn’t think so.

A family outing:

Mother, Father, son.

Where had they been?

What road were they on?

What rule was he flouting?

He doesn’t have a context.

The piece is small, a fragment.

How many beans …?

A cause and effect,

And the memory is stagnant.

He doesn’t remember the pain,

Just that there was pain.

It’s a kite tied to his wrist

And bullied by the air;

He struggles to let it soar –

It tugs and it twists.

Was it the stick, or the belt?

The arse or the legs?

(Where are the scars, the welts?

Have they healed or been sealed

In the skin, unforgiven?)

Did he squirm and beg?

Did he know it was coming?

The rest of the way home

His brain foaming,

His mind scrambling up a wall

It could never climb,

Unwilling to put into words,

Or pictures the punishment to come.

Or was it the first time?

Tempers overheated,

The lash of harsh word

And wagging-finger threat

Seeming chastisement enough,

Leaving him in a sulky slough,

As he pushed the bicycle homeward,

A pedal catching his calf,

Catching his calf.

But then

At home

The world - his world,

Such a small world – cracked;

The plates pushed askew,

Fault lines visible,

Continents torn;

And theirs, perhaps, too.

(Though wasn’t theirs just pasted over,

Plugged with duty, self-belief,

And love just not glue enough

To hold it all together?

And the stick becomes a baton

You have to run with, pass on,

The race never over, no line to cross,

And no one wins; the field is endless.)

And it’s always there, the flaw;

Hidden mostly, barely discernable,

But in a certain light …

In the garden, the sunshine slices

Through the tree, the fruit unripe,

Green and bitter,

Too early to be picked.

He looks at his daughter,

Tells her once more to climb down,

And this is the last time, or …

She swings on a branch, leaves flutter,

Light and shade jostle and mix.

She hangs, defiant, staring at the ground,

Releases a soft hiccup of laughter.

(At her age he had known,

Had had to bite down,

Had known himself naked,

Shedding one skin for another: flaked.)

She looks up, back at him;

No shadows skim her eyes,

No hint of withdrawal, or flinch,

She’s not yet his sintered mirror,

Her head tilted this way or that

Gives their unwarped images back.

He could teach her,

Flesh of his flesh, as yet unblooded;

Arraign her in the kangaroo court –

Held in camera –

Hopping from one foot

To another.

He’s felt the impulse,

Been baptised in the righteous,

Blinding fury – too strong a word,

Perhaps, but it’s beyond anger’s grip,

Something slipping loose,

Something reined in tight.

And she’d tidy her room,

And be quiet when told to.

And she’d still love him.

Isn’t that the beauty of it?
...


(An extract)