My son's 21st birthday brought this one on.
She watched the birds in ragged formation,
flying the January sky.
Her earthbound body lay close by a paperback book -
eight months gone.
‘Childbirth is a natural function
and anguish can give way to triumph.' It said.
She read and almost believed.
The mini-dress she wore for her wedding
hangs near the wardrobe door,
carefully preserved under polythene and dust-sheet
with mounted pictures of relations, posing in shades of grey.
The vegetables she cuts up for dinner are Class ‘A', standard and straight.
Nothing exotic, nothing erotic,
dinner must never be late.
She remembered the stone from an engagement ring lost in the snow.
And on her knees by the doormat, searching
among ice crystals for a shining hope,
how her children at school and husband at work could not help.
The uncles and aunts who sent the cards,
congratulating her firstborn son, are dead.
In his room, a blue plush elephant is celebrating its twenty first.
Her second child, a daughter of clothes shops and nightclubs, sleeps.
The husband she once knew, has withdrawn to a computer in the attic.
A woman alone, waiting for wings,
she sits, and she sings.
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