Beginning With Your Last Breath E-Book

Roy McFarlane

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 48

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

This debut collection of poems by former Birmingham Poet Laureate Roy McFarlane explores love, loss, adoption and identity in powerful, precise and emotionally-charged poetry. From bereavement comes forth a life story in poems; the journey of sons, friends, lovers and parents, and all the moments of growing-up, discovery, falling in and out of love and learning to say goodbye that come along the way. Themes of place, identity, history, and race interweave personal narratives, with and poems that touch on everything from the 'Tebbitt Test' and Marvin Gaye to the Black Country, that 'place just off the M6'. Distinct and memorable, McFarlane's poems are beautifully focused, moving their readers between both the spiritual and the sensual worlds with graceful, rapturous hymns to the transformative power of love.

Leseprobe

Beginning With Your

Last Breath

Beginning With Your Last Breath

Roy McFarlane

ISBN: 978-1-911027-08-9

Copyright © Roy McFarlane

Cover artwork: ‘She ain’t holding them up; She’s holding on (Some English Rose)’, © Sonia Boyce, 1986. All Rights Reserved. DACS 2016.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Roy McFarlane has asserted his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published September 2016 by:

Nine Arches Press

PO Box 6269

Rugby

CV21 9NL

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed in Britain by:

The Russell Press Ltd.

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

To Percella Araisa McFarlane

an extraordinary and beautiful mother

Contents

I

Papers

The weight of knowing

Painting

Fragments of a mother and son story

My mother, sister and I return to the place where I was born

II

That place just off the M6

The black corner of Wolverhampton

In Memory of Boxing

Baptism

Night and Day

Patterson’s House

Saturday Soup

The Tebbit Test (Patriotism)

After all is said and done

Surrender to the air

Burning with a rage that Babylon would never understand…

Saving our Sons

Finding X/Self

III

A Love Supreme

I found my father’s love letters

Lost in Birmingham

The beauty of a scar

The day after we argued

Never say goodbye

As I did the night before

The Baroness and the Monk

A poet in Amsterdam

Tipton

Nearly There (I)

IV

The year Maya Angelou died

Lighting up History

Leaves are falling

I cried

The map of your leg

The first time

Hiding

The Great Escape

One last Psalm before you go to sleep

Beginning with your last breath

Nearly There (II)

Notes

Acknowledgements

I

‘The word for love, habib, is written from right to left, starting where we would end it and ending where we might begin.’

‘A Soldier’s Arabic’ – Brian Turner

Papers

The day I was called into my mother’s bedroom

the smell of cornmeal porridge still coloured the air,

windowsills full of plants bloomed

and dresses half-done hung from wardrobe doors

and her Singer sewing machine came to rest

like a mail train arriving at its final destination,

foot off the pedal, radio turned down, she beckoned,

touched me with those loving hands.

Shrouded in the softness of light from the net curtains,

her eyes filled with sensitivity, hesitated as she spoke to me,

sit down son, there’s something I need to tell you.

She picked up her heavy Bible with gold-edged leaves,

turning the pages as they whispered and somewhere

in the middle of Psalms she removed a sheet of paper

which read, ‘In the matter of the Adoption Act. 1958’

and I’m lost in the reading of a name of an infant,

sinking in to the cream background, falling between the lines.

Only the tenderness of her voice drew me out of the margins;

words fallen now echo through the years.

We adopted you from the age of 6 months,

enveloped by this revelation I couldn’t move,

imagined it couldn’t be right because I knew my mother;

the aroma of her Morgan pomaded hair, her olive oiled skin,

the Y scarred throat that she hid under buttoned up blouses,

and like a hymn I found myself telling her, it’s alright, it’s alright.

The weight of knowing

The woman in the photograph

surrounded by siblings looking just like me;

this was the woman who gave me away.

And now she wanted to know me,

trying to connect to me. Unbelievable, coming from

the woman in the photograph.

It was my turn to reject, stuff my emotions away,

ready to make a quick getaway because

this was the woman who gave me away.

The weight of knowing her was too heavy to put on,

and my anger tipped the scales beyond reason.

The woman in the photograph

sent me letters to leave me in a spell

but I was conjured by memories that

this was the woman who gave me away.

And those eyes telling their tales

and untold stories couldn’t change the fact of

the woman in the photograph;

this was the woman who gave me away.

Painting

She ain’t holding them up; she’s holding on(some English Rose) by Sonia Boyce, 1986

I saw my mother in this painting of Sonia Boyce;

the woman wearing a cerise dress with black roses,

holding her family above her head – a basket of life.

And like her she was holding us up,

her load no lighter for having two babies

out of wedlock, holding on, making a life

in strange places, fighting the struggle of womanhood.

Love evaded her twice, men she couldn’t hold on to,

no matter how wide she opened her heart.

Holding on to any job whilst handing over her babies

to be held by others until she returned, tired and weary.

Holding on to hope that a childless couple would take

care of the one she’d leave behind; knowing

that her last breath upon his skin would be a new beginning.

Fragments of a mother and son story

I surrendered unto the unknown,

followed the route my mother took

and looked out the window and wondered if she

thought of what she left behind

or flew into the future blindly

towards some distant star

that migrant birds are guided by.

From London to Toronto to Winnipeg,

a day of travelling to find meaning to

my years of roaming; flying back in time

to a place eight hours behind

to find the beginning of my journey.

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