Jarrow Doll
Laura Potts
These penitent nights, chapel-black
where the terrace turns its back to the hills,
after the wild white fists and the fight,
the blood-bite-kiss and the mist of the morning
over the dock, in the glowering grey
like a sentinel fox I slip in the dawn on
and beyond the wharfside-wetland-headland
away. Behind, my wound-tight sweat-damp
night and a lover whose name I never quite
know. Oh dockland dim and fog on the moor,
the wind at the water-bridge stops
at my corner-whore feet as I turn from that
frostshard street and home, a lone
lamp dim in the last laugh of night.
My Tyne-light mirrors me Madonna gone shy:
I who split spines of hills with my stride,
the mariner’s wife who watched from the shore
that ship ten years too lost. Now, the frost
of my widowhood workhouse-dark, my skull
holding eyes like cradles carved
with a terminal hand, and then when
the river moves the moon through the land
and I hold something crèche in my canyon
again, to rinse off the men from my skin
I remember. Before the bairns get in, I am
a heavy, bleeding gender. Your medal tender
glows on from the hearth, man of my heart,
seaman my own. Know only this: though
the field sheds its coat to the wind your infants
are clothed in the sweet sweet spring of youth,
a matriarch lighthouse guiding them home.
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Cauldron Anthology