First Wish

 

For M.I.S

Scatter me over the flat fields by Ely,

under the skies that levelled my growing.

Country tempers sent me to London

at school’s end. It was service for me,

your girl, to knock in some sense:

she said what she meant, my Ma, packed

me, close as ashes, into the train.

Clackety-bang, it went, and smoked.

Years upsi-downed in the city smog,

lungs choked by acid and carbon.

I found most of your once father

ahead of the war, discovered

your dead brother and you,

lit my bonfires, good old flames,

before rain could sizzle the embers.

That drawer holds bits of home;

photos, photos, photos;

stiff-corseted mother by father,

pipe skew under his nose,

prize bullock cudding behind,

white as flooden death in a foe

winter, while barns shed

clapboard from roof to roots.

I’ve kept for a lifetime

linen and shifts embroidered

by aunts who worked out

their eyes where the lamp dulled,

fields rotted from autumn
and iced dykes rippled. My bone 
skates were lashed to boots

cracked in the sole.

I stiffened in freedom’s chill.

So, swept up and clapped in a box,

carry me there; not to the church

where family names, respectable,

three deep, line those damp walls,

nor to the kitchen, yeasty and warm

with Wednesday bread, but take

me back to the blown scapes. I'll run 
level; flit, fleet with a straight, fen wind.