Milena Poems
This, Desmond Graham’s fifth full collection, brings together poems written over twelve years which bear witness to a child’s growth: ‘a thank you certainly’ but also, as he explains in the Author’s note, a work ‘of respect and admiration’. These poems for and about the poet’s daughter Milena take us from the first sightings of an Ultrasound Scan – ‘vertebrae like sweetcorn/toes a spark of light’ – into the deft and learned ways of the infant: ‘She is learning her hands/like a flute player/with the little finger perched/on an inch of thin air/above the last stop’. The crawling baby who looks up at the Cologne cathedral of your knees becomes the toddler we travel and make discoveries with, who leads you into her story; ‘from kitchen to lounge/few words are needed, up the stairs/peer through the window/stagger your way back down’. Synchronised with the growth is an increasing awareness of the transitory nature of the place he has within it. ‘Will I go with all your stories/into your childhood, left behind,/with the lost child you played/and I rescued?’ The learning is two way as the child teaches its reach of imagination, its playing out of care and companionship, and the poet learns how to let go, to be overtaken.
She is learning to let go
She is learning to let go
right up to the last moment
so you still almost have it
till it slips by chance
beyond your control
before you could grasp it back
she can take up
light as a tiger her young
whatever you give her
keep it just on the verges of loss
with a touch of the forefinger
corkscrews of thumb
she can peer into departure
minutely inspecting its weight
learning it up through her fingers
finding at what point
whatever is here goes
where it went does not matter.
***
She reads upside down posters
She reads upside down posters, notices
holding dead buildings up,
adverts on buses held up at the lights,
she reads foreheads, angles of body,
pauses: she can read where silence
starts, where it reaches its climax,
where it needs tilting, her key
working a bad lock and succeeding,
she reads the backs of people going down stairs,
their jumpers and shoulders,
the pile on the carpet as someone
sits down with a problem,
she will read through the faces,
the sounds of embarrassment flickering,
as the full force of disapproval
flashes on the front page
of a look; sometimes, without reading,
she just closes the book.
Recording: from Milena Poems
