Clare Pollard

Afterbirth

Pain is lonely.

It is nothing to do with goodness.

The night you were born, I barely thought of love:

I could not think beyond pain’s edges, how it moved,

shuddered steadily through me, looting and burning;

how words decomposed in my mouth to brute noise.

I was naked, on all-fours. I was shitting.

There was a lull

and blood plop-plopped on the floor.

Was it mine or yours? It was you, a you

locked in struggle with me,

mortal and writhing to be out.

Then your fierce squall, the caul’s net,

you clambering blind to my breast –

tiny beloved foe, blood splattered –

and the placenta slopped out, vast and raw,

and the pain went, we slipped its trap,

we clung to each other in truce.

‘You’re safe now,’ I lied, I couldn’t help it,

though they said you were a boy

and we know what sons are for.

They will tell you that war

is the same kind of suffering, the kind you must endure

to get to love, our wanted world, but I do not

want it without you.

You can’t have been made just to be unmade,

all these slow months, these sleepless nights,

as you gnaw my spluttering breast, grow drip by drip,

your little fingers; your sweet, wet mouth –

and death is so relentless, so grim,

what use is it to you?

It’s mud that fills the throat.

It’s 3am. Your warm head flops to my chest,

somewhere our guns bang, a boy slumps

blood-splattered, clambering blind, he cannot

think beyond war’s edges, and a shudder

moves steadily to his mother

as the world squanders his body:

its painstaking work.

*

Lullaby over a Moses Basket

You’re beauty and breath,

I’ll hide you from death,

its struggling waters,

             I’ll stow away hate.

You’re safer with daughters,

             the shush of the rushes.

Your crib will be lined

with pitch and with slime

and laid on the brink

             of the traitorous Nile.

I beg you don’t drink

             the hush of the rushes.

They praise my belief!

I’m rocking with grief

but have to believe

             I’ll touch you again

and so I believe

             Hashem in the rushes.

The current is strong,

will stink with this wrong

beneath seeping skies,

             make gathering Hell

scratch nursery doors –

             it’s the wish of the rushes.

*

The Day Amy Died

(after Frank O’Hara)

It was a Saturday in July 2011. Coffee and papers,

which is usually a treat but there’d been this shooting

in Norway. Did you hear about that, even?

Then the pub, where I heard about you.

Ash had run the Race for Life and I was five ciders down.

A woman came at 16.30 and said:

                                                   ‘Amy Winehouse is dead’,

and everyone at every table checked phones or Blackberries,

BBC or Twitter; muttering ‘tragic’

and ‘her dad doesn’t know yet’,

and the skin on my face went very chill and tight,

and it was a warm Dalston night –

you could see the Gherkin and hipsters eating

Turkish chopped-salads and a girl in vintage polka-dots,

black kids, Tesco full of lesbians –

and when Rich and I took a back-route, smoking weed,

looking at the pavement and sky, I was feeling my

blood. I was thinking of you and if it’s better to live

to 27 than never live,

and then at Luke and Suzi’s we said ‘tragic’ and

they fed me curry and, okay, more wine,

and when I came back, 00.30, I couldn’t help logging in

to look and it said 92 feared dead now in Norway and

all over Facebook there were links to your videos –

your stopped face, but we could press play

and you’d jerk to life: tiny, feral, your arms

vandalised like toilet cubicles. Our cartoon.

Underneath they’d written OMG and tragic and like Janis

or like Billie and stupid selfish overrated bitch

and it’s easy to say that shit is inevitable,

but I won’t, Amy.

I won’t.

*

The Contradiction

The absence contradicts itself:

the missing conjures what we miss.

You are not here, I’m not myself,

but still I talk to you like this.

You’re in the crowd, the news, the glimpse –

I make you there when you’re not there.

I trace your steps, I map your face,

I say your name, see you in air.

You’re all I know and so unknown.

I cannot hold you, yet I do:

please let me hold you in my head

and where you are now, hold me too.

How can you be so near and far?

You are not here. But here you are.

11 Jordan, September 2012

12 The Reef

14 Suffer

19 The Last Poem of Rabia Balkhi, Written in Blood on Her Bathroom Walls After Her Veins Were Cut by Her Brother

20  Kingdom

21 Knowledge

22 Message Beamed From Earth to Europa: 03:01 EST

23 Circuit

24 Afterbirth

26 The Very Hungry Animal

27 Solipsist Pantoum

28 Beholden

29 Digitalis

30 Ghazal of the Rose

31 Parables

33 The Human Child

34 Emmanuel

36 Object Permanence

37 At Peckham Rye

38 Lullaby over a Moses Basket

39 The Fair is Coming

40 Singapore

41 In the City of Shiva

43 The Day Amy Died

45 The Contradiction

46 Soft Play

48 Hamelin

49 23 Mindblowing Truths You Didn’t Know About the Princess

51 The Pool of Tears

54 Pinocchios

55 Los Indignados

56 On Pie Corner

57 Sapiens

58 Leviathan

60 Lines after Rabi‘ah al-Baṣrī

63 Monte Alban

64 Boys

66 In the Horniman Museum

'The themes are ancient – guilt, grief, the almost unbearable com-mingling of beauty and suffering – but shown through contemporary globalised life in all its grossness and glory…Pollard’s wit, honesty and recklessness.’ – Frances Leviston, Yorkshire Post, on Changeling

'This fourth collection from the Bolton-born, East London-living, wildly talented young poet is a total beauty. Changeling witnesses Clare Pollard brilliantly re-rub some old English folktales and transcribe them to our own troubled times, as well as offering up some 40 of her own bewitching compositions. These leap ably between ancient lore and recent political outrage… this is proper knockout, stop-you-in-your-tracks stuff.' – Dazed and Confused, on Changeling