The pain of requited love?

I am daily aware of, and hugely grateful for, the immense amount of privilege that I enjoy.

One of these huge joys is that I am loved by the people that I love most.  I endeavour not to take this for granted or to treat this gift too lightly.

Many of my early attempts at writing poetry, as a younger person, were based on experiences of unrequited love, or heartbreak, or mortifying misunderstandings. I have no doubt that the writing produced was not very accomplished. I have very little desire to trawl through old word documents to attempt to find any examples. Yet, at that time, I felt extremely motivated to express my feelings in poems.

In my current phase of life, I am searching for ways to write meaningfully about the relationships that I have with the people I love. One slightly paralysing consideration is that these people will probably read what I write – not usually a problem when writing about an ex, or about someone who doesn’t even know you exist. This was one factor that delayed my writing about my Grandad’s death. My Grandma might read it, my parents, my aunt: people who knew and loved him longer and better than me. I am still holding back on either writing or sharing elegies about other relatives and friends for the same reason. This is also why I struggle to write poems about, or for, my husband. This is why I worry about writing in too much detail about giving birth to my sons, or the subsequent experience of parenting them.

If I write too specifically about loved ones, especially in a ‘warts ‘n’ all’ fashion, am I betraying their trust? If I use my children’s names, is that a data protection issue? How do I avoid the ‘miserable mum’ genre without glossing over the fact that motherhood is the hardest thing I’ve experienced?

There are many people who have managed to do this very well. Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s poems about motherhood, for example. Ciaran Carson writing about his wife’s serious illness in his recent work. Writing about more mature relationships is the next step in my poetic development.

Heritage

Back in May, I attended the funeral of my grandad. The service was a thanksgiving for, and celebration of, the life of a well-loved man. He, like the majority of my family, had a strong Christian faith and there was a powerful sense of shared hope for a heavenly consolation as a packed church congregation sang together throughout the service.

Certain lines from the hymns stood out to me, and I hope to be able to write poems that echo them:

Drop thy still dews of quietness,

till all our strivings cease…

Mine is the sunlight

Mine is the morning

I looked to Jesus, and I found

In Him my Star, my Sun;

And in that Light of Life I’ll walk

Till trav’lling days are done.

This post was begun soon after the event, but I didn’t manage to finish it at the time. For many reasons – some of which I will blog about another time. But one reason was because of a poem I wrote for my Grandma about my Grandad. I gave it to her at the funeral. I believe she got it printed in that Sunday’s edition of Pew News, the notice bulletin handed out at her church. But it felt a bit too soon to go more ‘public’ with it (that is, pretending the readership of this blog extends further than my immediate family…).

Except…

The week after the funeral, I entered the poem in a poetry competition. In fact, it had been written to conform specifically to the exacting demands of the competition – an 821 poem, which has an initial stanza of 8 lines, followed by a couplet and ending with a single line, which should also contain a volta or ‘twist’ of some kind. The organisers also stated (as most competitions/publishers do) that the work must not have been published anywhere before, including on a personal blog. Luckily, my offering was met with a polite ‘no’ from the competition, which means that I can put it on here.

So, although it feels a bit morally ambiguous that I wrote a poem that was simultaneously for my Grandma as she mourns her husband, and also an entry for a competition, it is also my tribute to my Grandad.

Heritage

My grandad, with his northern vowels,

‘Let’s ‘av a luke’, ‘bring me that buke’.

Child-me thrilled at the way he spoke.

My grandad, on his daily strolls

‘cross Cookham Moor to the churchyard.

My grandad, the musical lad:

church organist, and taught my dad.

Now my sons caress the keyboard.

My grandad, who made pilgrimage,

and brought back stones from Galilee,

has come into his heritage.