A few months ago, a poem of mine, ‘Candidate’, was included in the Beautiful Dragons Noble Dissent anthology. The anthology was a reaction to right wing bias in international politics: the false rhetoric attached to the referendum, the rise of the Right in Europe, the election of Trump to the most powerful political position in the world. My poem was inspired by the ‘do and say anything to win an election’ mentality, and is a pastiche of Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Girl’, which you can check out here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1978/06/26/girl
‘Candidate’ is a similar prose-poem sort of rant.

On Thursday Donald Trump arrived in the UK on an official tour, making it clear in his interview with The Sun that he is not going to be a post-Brexit soft touch for a trade deal, which seems to have been the main reason for inviting him in the first place. A Trump Baby blimp and hundreds of thousands of protestors around the country let him know exactly how welcome he is here. I was one of them. A tee shirt at the Manchester rally had the legend  “The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” (Albert Einstein). Einstein knew what he was talking about, having lived through the Nazi era. Britain has a history of appeasing fascism in the thirties, and look where that got us. So on Friday, Hilary and I went to the rally in Albert Square in Manchester.

Hilary Robinson and I heading for the rally in Manchester’s Albert Square 

My daughter bought us the silly outfits, and they caused a lot of amusement in the crowd; but the rally had a serious message: that Trump’s racist, mysoginist, alt-right policies are not welcome here; that it isn’t OK to cage children separated from their asylum-seeking parents; that white is definitely not supreme. Dissent is a small act, but a noble one; and hundreds of thousands of voices add up to a very big voice. I’m glad we went: It was worth the soaking we got from a very sharp shower just as the rally closed.

There, that’s my rant done. Apart from protesting Trump, it has been a very productive week in other ways. I have continued to work on the PhD thesis, researching the cult of the mother in Western patriarchies: lots of reading about fairy tales, bible stories and evidence in history. I wrote up my response in the week, finishing it on Saturday morning. I’m quite pleased with it, it fits well into the writing I’d already done. I moved on to the next task; but there is only so much a brain can take, so having decided where I need to go next, I left it for next week and worked instead on the creative aspect. I finished revisiting the poems, printed off the latest version and thought about the order I want them to be in the finished collection. I spent an hour in the conservatory—the only place the cats can be excluded from—setting them out in themes across the floor. I’ve started with ‘motherhood in general’; moved on to poems inspired by my own mother, arranged in themes. So there are ‘thingy  poems’ as Jean Sprackland calls them: poems inspired by objects that bring my mother to mind; poems about roles and relationships; poems about grandmothers, real or imagined. I’ve concluded the collection with the two sequences I’ve been working on: my alternative mother poems and the poems depicting the death of my brother and how that affected my relationship with my mother. It was good to see the poems spread out and to affect an order, because they were written fairly randomly. Today I will work on copy/pasting them into the thesis in order, a full collection at the end of the critical work. I look forward to that; to seeing the whole thing in first draft. I feel as if the end is in sight now the two aspects are coming together; and, after all, ten months is a very short time in the life of a PhD.

I graduated this week. Oh, no! Not my PhD; my running! I completed the ‘Couch to 5K’ challenge with a fastest ever pace: I got PBs for the 1K and the 1mile as well; and a cup: I got a cup from the app to celebrate completion. I haven’t run 5K yet; but I have run 3K so that’ll do for starters. 3K is almost 2miles in old currency. Can you imagine? I ran for nearly two miles! I’ll keep up the running, even though the challenge is complete. I’ve got to get to 5K at least. I’ll keep you posted on progress.

A little light relief mid-week: Bill and I went to the Palace Theatre in Manchester to see ‘Mamma Mia’. It was a good, energetic romp through the Abba songs, plenty of eighties memories—unfortunately, not all of them good! Abba became a bit samey toward the end of their career; but I still think ‘Waterloo’ is the best Eurovision winner ever.

Last, but by no means least, it is my birthday tomorrow. I’ve changed my Facebook profile pic to a photograph of me when I was five to celebrate; and to prove I was young once! My lovely children have sent me 2 tickets to see Sir Ian McKellen in ‘King Lear’ at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London on September 29^th; with first class rail tickets to get us there. The theatre tickets are in the Royal Circle; I don’t think a tiara is required but I’ll feel like a queen: I have the best children ever. Fact.

I’m going to finish with a poem I’ve been working on; actually it’s two versions of a poem. I’ve retained them both as parts 1 and 2; but I don’t know if it works like that. I’m reluctant to get rid of either but not sure I need both. I’ll leave it for now; a bit of space will provide the answer I need. The poem is inspired by my mother making soup on Monday from Sunday roast left-overs. I didn’t know when I was a child that it was a money-saver, a means of making ends meet. I loved it; I still like a bowl of heart-warming soup, full of goodness, easy and cheap. Here’s the poem.

Stone Soup

1
When I used to read that story to your grandchildren,
the way the trickster gets the poor woman
to make soup from a stone,
I think of you
cooking soup from Sunday left-overs.
Like in the story, your soup begins with water in a pan.
You drop into it, like a stone, the carcass
of Sunday’s lunch, picked clean;
an Oxo cube or two, some onion, carrot,
pearl barley, sage, potato, turnips, salt and pepper.

With my mouth watering, I listen as it simmers away
slowly,
smell the flavours mixing, impatient
for you to serve it up, my spoon
fisted in anticipation.

You make loaves of soda bread
we break into rafts to float in our soup lakes.

I don’t understand about making ends meet,
to me your soup is a feast.

Once, aged six, bridging the loneliness
between school and home,
I tell Miss Bacon—wishing out loud—
that we’re having soup for tea.
All afternoon the lie lays in my stomach
like a stone.

But as I walk from the school bus,
up the path towards the kitchen door,
the scent of your soup welcomes me home,
a nose full of tummy rumbling goodness
rubbing out the lie.

2
Start with this boulder, throw it
into the water bubbling in the pan, she says,
the way a storm might brag before it erupts
with the force that a practiced trickster
proves herself to be. She takes
the skeleton of yesterday’s roast, the flesh
picked clean and in it goes—poor protein,
but with onion, carrot, potato, a woman
can perform a Sermon on the Mount miracle
to satisfy a hungry pack, eking it out
with soda bread floats. The soup is as easy
as the enthusiasm it takes to move from
growling bellies to full ones. A magician she is;
she can produce soup from a stone.

Rachel Davies
July 2018