I braided a basket of my fingers,
in case I was required to catch
you
if you fell from any sort of height
or perhaps needed a boost
to reach a shelf
or a step
on a ladder I could hold
once I’d unwoven these hands
to grip the rungs better
if you eventually decide
to climb.
Image by Pexels from Pixabay
Someone comments that she’d never really worked. Not a proper job. Not a nine-to-five, sit down at a desk, shuffle the papers, count the numbers, find the words sort of job. She just ‘helped’ her parents in their shop, then ‘helped’ her husband.
At Christmas my mother, her daughter, takes the carving knife. Skills become ingrained when you park a pram in the backroom of a butcher’s. They get passed down on generation to the next. Not always perfect, but present like the bark and callous of their hands when they take mine. Evidence of everything they’ve given.
She says she never really worked a proper job, not a nine-to-five, like I have. Passes me the cutter for scones that won’t be as good as her mother’s, because she hasn’t got the knack like she had. She was only ever ‘helping’ not working, not like her daughter does, not like I do. She was only ever there in the background.
Autumn is not Spring,
but beauty still grows in her
and there is worth there.
Belly stretched bare to sun,
these hands could be paws
when fingers curl in to palms,
padding softly,
or soft patter
of rain on skin,
water caught in fur
till I shrug free this coat
and the weight
of me
trapped inside of it.
One paragraph for all the lost bodies,
somewhere still beneath dirt and grass
and the slow trundle of grazing cattle
meandering, one fence line to another.
Musket balls get plucked up on odd days,
rolled across a palm like a marble,
dropped into a Tupperware tub,
they outlasted the bones and flesh.
A field with five hundred years to forget
yet the calf gets sick with lead
loses its eyesight to a pellet
from a gun fired half a century before.
History reaches past its paragraph
of three thousand nameless men.
Another misery of litter
leftover once the war was done.
Following tonight’s theme of smoke and mirrors, and feeling like the older you get, the less you actually know, I started thinking about how we learn about the history of warfare in schools. There’s a disconnect between the modern day and its wars, and battles such as the one at Bloor Heath* in Staffordshire where around three thousand men are thought to have died in the fighting.
It’s easy to look at these historic events and pick apart the motivations, and the mistakes that were made. However, when dealing with similar situations in more modern settings, the issue can often seem clouded.
I’m left to wonder what will be written five hundred years from now about the current wars being fought and the empires being built.
*The Battle of Blore Heath was part of the Wars of the Roses. I’ve been debating getting back into writing some historic posts so if you’d be interested in knowing more I’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Would it be odd to re-introduce history posts onto the site?
These wings don’t go far,
or high much.
They rustle the leaves
in the hedge
when summer sits about,
the branches
when summer has flit south.
There is something to be said
for roots over wings.
For a spot to return to
each time,
when it’s warm or cold
and I don’t want
to go far or high very much.
Carol J Forrester 
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