DAUGHTER
Your mother’s daughter, you set your face to the road that ran by the river;
behind you, the castle, its mute ballroom, lowered flag.
Stoic, your profile a head on a coin, you followed the hearse through sorrow’s landscape- a farmer, stood on a tractor, lifting his tweed cap; a group of anglers shouldering their rods. And now the villagers, silently raising their mobile phones. Then babies held aloft in the towns, to one day be told they were there. But you had your mother’s eyes, as a horse ran free in a field; a pheasant flared from a hedge like a thrown bouquet;
journeying on through a harvest of strange love. How they craned to glimpse their lives again in her death;
reminded of Time’s relentless removals, their own bereavements,
as she passed.
The uplift of the high bridge over a dazzle of water;
a sense of ascending into anointing light which dissolved into cloud.
Nine more slow grey miles to the Old Town; the last mile a royal mile, where they gathered ten-deep as your mother showed you what she had meant. Nightfall and downpour near London.
Even the motorways paused; thousands of headlights in rain as you shadowed her still; smatterings of applause from verges and bridges. Soon enough they would come to know this had long been the Age of Grief; that History was ahead of them. The crown of ice melting on the roof of the world. Tonight, childhood’s palace; the iPhone torches linking back to medieval flame. So you slowed and arrived with her, her only daughter, and only her daughter.
Carol Ann Duffy
Former Poet Laureate.
Comments