Empiricism

Norton Hodges

My Dad said he'd always wanted
to visit the Holy Land and see for
himself if the stories were true.
But his first and only trip abroad was
to Malta, where he was bombed, starved
and saw things he'd never talk about after.
Sometimes he'd roll up his trouser leg
and show me his white knee and the
place where the shrapnel had gone in.
I'd shift from foot to foot, not knowing what to do
until that day in the hospital when, finally,
I knew, and kissed his cold yellow forehead.

---

Elective Affinities

Norton Hodges

From the full dance card of her young womanhood,
my Mum's reduced
to one partner: me.
The furniture of our lives is shifted from around us
while we stand there
until the room's empty.
But when I survey the unexpected wreckage of our family,
desertion, death, sheer indifference,
I think this:
Maybe we could make another one from scratch,
a mongrel crew of friends,
Dutch uncles, poets, other people's children.

---

Dear Eileen

for my mother

Norton Hodges

Sometimes I get the feeling you're not who you say you are,
that you've given up your role as my witness and co-conspirator,
smiling in complicity at my drawings of alien spaceships,
at my first recognisable tune sung to C, F and G.

Although you can still order from Sainsbury's or ring the agency
when you carer doesn't come, at other times you seem
adrift in your secret work, the long-desired return to childhood
where you've finished your jobs and can go out to play.

For out there, nothing's connected to nothing,
time's a long succession of small delights while
others make the rules, leaving you free to
hop, skip, run and jump to your heart's content.

Out there you're free to escape from the silly grown-ups,
half-amused by their oh-so-serious faces, pausing first
just outside the gate, as in that photo of you as a little girl,
to squint distrustfully at whoever's delaying your bliss.