Sylvia Plath Daddy Re-imagined For Mummy
Posted On 22/03/2020
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’
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