Sylvia Plath Daddy Re-imagined For Mummy

For my Mum, a poem on Mother’s Day. I love you.

Mummy

 You do and do, you do and do
 Forever white stilettò shoe
 In which you have lived
 For seventy years, gave and gived
 Always able to whip up food
 
 Mummy, I have had to live up to you
 Winged torso, halo hair
 Blood of ages, breath of care
 Pink saints pleated into your skirt
 Shielding torment, halving hurt
 
 Turning pain into something new.
 On a green hill, down an empty lane
 Morris dancers on an English grave.
 I thought every woman I loved was you
 Well, no not every
  
 Just the one, the beam of light 
 An Electra laser that cut the night
 Mummy she was the spit of you
 A Rorschach Nefertiti, Ikea
 Kitchen symmetry
 
 The overblown bluff of hair
 We all missed her...
 Forgive me for talking back to you
 When nursing me back, like the eighties
 West coast Sapphos did
  
 For our brothers with the HIV.
 With every twist of your deformed foot
 In Mother Teresa’s moccasin shoe
 You tended to my broken heart
 If you tended one, you tended two.
  
 In my heart and eye, eye, eye
 I see you at the cooker, then
 Flying o’er the Calder Valley 
 Calling Mother Nature stood
 At the delta of the flood.
  
 Mummy when I make it through 
 The yawning V of each day
 I hear half the villagers say
 She’s a chip off the old block
 Mummy, Mummy, what luck, what luck.
  
 Note for the Reader: 
 This poem is for all intent and purposes credited as a response to and forever indebted: 
 1 to the unwavering love of my Mum who swings me with love eternally
2 to the bravery of Sylvia Plath and her poem ‘Daddy’