Eirlys

Running down to winter the vines
put on a last spurt
tendril towards the sun
light harvesting, scrape October's
thin sky soup onto their green plates
and gorge before the first chill breath
fills their veins with dried blood.
Up with the larky radiocaster
I drive through morning twilight
past women statuesque at bus-stops
knowing I can't give a lift to them all.

Up betimes our foremothers, cycladic
thighs thickened by childbearing
and buttocky suet pudding
or spry draggletails, gran's army
of widows and those whose old men
weren't up to much, waited for trams
dreading winter's onset, out in the frozen dark
with stockings over their boots
to swab and flick a duster
before the office boys blew in
shooting their paper cuffs.

All over the world they are still rising
to slice snow from pavements
under my hotel window on a Moscow morning
clean carriages, polish boards for money
to walk over, wipe the seats
for other bums and flush, polish
the city's sole with elbow grease
and beeswax, holding back disorder
and the silting down of dust, time's
and weather's fingerprint on sill
or handle, forerunners of that last
slide into all our winters.

And I think of how we laid one in the earth
on a summer morning, celebrating the four kids
she raised alone, her five jobs to keep them
and how her tall sons' tears acclaimed
her membership of those secret
battalions that might sweep the old
order away. She was called Eirlys.

One Sunday dinner time she spelled it
for me on the pub table in spilt beer
that old name of a white flower
from her native mountains and woods.
Slim still as an asphodel
poking up through the dust
she would have taken pan and brush to.
Her life held up to the light
seems full of bright motes dancing.

Maureen Duffy

Family Values
Enitharmon / Dufour Editions