Agoloso Presents - Atondido Stories Agoloso Presents - Mama Mada | Page 282

Mama Mada
The Visit by Ange la France
Brown is the colour of waiting; a wainscot in a dingy room,
straight-backed chairs against the wall, tweed coats
on old women whose felt hats nod in approval and tilt
towards each other. They lean together to whisper
lineage, connections; which daughter, whose son, what cousin
is parent to the child who holds her grandmother’s hand
as she’s led through to the inner room. Beyond the door,
an old man leans from a narrow bed and the colours of dying
are yellow and white. A sheet winds round him, rumples
to leave a scrawny leg exposed, jaundiced against the linen
and his stained beard quivers as he mumbles over the bowl
held by a shadowy woman who counts his golden breaths.
My Children by David Mo rle y
Where I lived with my children the whole summer long
The Gypsy progs the slow fire and listens.
‘I do not write,’ John Clare tells Wisdom Smith,
‘my fingers founder on raising a pen;
‘my eye blackens the parlour and the hearth;
‘all I love – hedges and fields, stand silent;
‘I have no pride in working or in life;
‘I no longer have a friend in yourself;
‘I have no friend in myself’. ‘I had children’,
breathes Wisdom, ‘all three boys now dead or grown.
I was a boy myself when fathering them.
Those boys’. The Gypsy rises and stares at John:
‘Don’t – don’t stamp on yourself’. ‘Every moment
I stamp on myself. Were poems children
I should stamp their lives out’. ‘Then do not make them’.
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