I am cleaning out my closet, going through old boxes, seeing what can be salvaged from all these pre digital scraps. These three poems are from Calgary, 1984. They are three of my first poems. 

My mother died of cancer when I was in my final year of high school. I began writing poetry in earnest when I entered university. My first goal in writing poetry was to somehow rescue her memory from oblivion. I felt it was the least I could do, having hidden my love away during her final years.

She left me a wound that would never heal, a shock I always needed to reiterate.  

The first poem describes an empty room, a window, memories, and then a softening of pain as the mind is emptied out in a moment of swooning. What is this emptiness?

A Softening (in memory of my mother)

Her room is varnished empty now,
but for shadows of leaves 
on the morning walls.
There are no sheets on the bed,
strong still at battles end.
Lilacs gently purple sunshine.
That at least is the same.

Us on her bed 
with mugs of tea;
I touched lilacs up
to her laughing lips.
All gone.

Incense clouds
from flowers of condolence
cleanse the house of lilac ghosts, 
flood my head with emptiness.

I had in a box a few black and white photos of my mother, taken when she was a girl. I stared into these for hours. I saw all her innocence frozen in ice. I couldn’t fathom the fact that this photo showed a real moment that was gone, a life that was gone.  How could this be? Where was she now?

I had her walk in this poem, to try to shake her image free of the ice which enclosed it in the photo.

Collector of Sea Shells

Beside the sea wall,
rubbed up against 
the sooty back of the town,
a plastic pail of smiling suns and moons
a cradle in the small, cold
crook of your fingers.

You step across
crab clack, creaking breathe
of a thousand claws in kelp,
pick between tide pools
blooming violet anemone.  Spindrift

pulls a perfume trace before your eyes
and in the wind fanning out your hair
to halo the shore

hear the sea’s sleep heart beat
shells, you gather shells from grip of mist

I spent the first five year of my life in Northern Ireland.  We spent a lot of time at the seaside.  When the Troubles grew ugliest, my father transplanted us to Alberta.  There, my mother died of homesickness, cursing the prairie moon base on which we’d landed.  There were no seasides near Calgary, and memories of the seaside became the prelapsarian world I shared in my soul with my mother. (A world cleansed of beatings and killings.) 

This association became consolidated as I stylised my mourning in poetry.  The cry of gulls has always pierced me to the heart.

Renewal

Cloth stuttered 
soft sea breeze
against your skin,
a subtle and meandering
mesh of love.

Now, the mingling sea
tugs at my legs and my sleeves,
draws its ozone breath
around me.

Yellow gull mouths
pull at strands
like straw and sand 
from my hair.

Cloud buoyant 
they pick at my shape
to untangle thin silver
and weave threads glistening
far out into the blanching sky.