Poetry By Rosemary McLeish

       João Prado Flickr



Deadly Nightshade

It seemed like a pretty way to die.
A purple flower, a few green leaves.
Stuffed in the mouth, easy,
nicer than lupin pods, not so crunchy.

In  the garden of my grandmother
there are gooseberry bushes
but I didn’t come from there:
they are only laughing at me who say so.
I come from the sky
and the hospital
where they changed me,
gave me to the wrong mother.

She doesn’t like girls, my grandmother.
She’s a nasty old woman,
face like rhubarb,
tongue like a nettle.
She catches me hiding
in the gooseberry bushes,
drags me out, careless of cuts and scratches.
Her hands are hurting hands.

“What have you done?” she says.
I say nothing.
She drags me to the house,
to the downstairs cloakroom,
but I don’t want to go.
I want what I cannot have,
my daddy to take me away with him.
But he is already gone
and I am too sad and too little to look for him.

How does she know?
She always knows everything.
She is a witch,
mouth like a thistle,
fingers like forks.
She sticks them down my throat,
makes me sick.
She smacks, shouts,
calls me ‘stupid little girl’,
says I have no right, what was I thinking?
I hate her.
Everything goes black.

Nobody speaks to me.
The mother rules the roost now.
Slaps are easier to come by than words.
I am stuck. There’s no escape.

And I don’t know it yet, but
I will always have a grandmother
to make me sick,
to drag me and shake me,
to walk the floor with me.
She is there when I take the pills
She mocks my lack of coins for the gas.
She taunts me when I lie on the kerb
in Avignon and can’t get up.
Today she haunted me when I thought
of the knives in the kitchen.

Mad, cruel-fingered witch
forcing me to live in this angry world
without him, without him.

​


Horror History

There are no ghosts here,
just memories of the grandmothers,
the one with her grinding poverty,
the cruelty of her teasing, the other
with her frowns, her second sight,
her dislike of girls.

There is no axe murderer
behind the shower curtain,
only the black of  the boot cupboard,
the Three Wise Men on the attic stairs,
the three bears lying in wait
in the living room,
the green man with the spear
crouched round the bend of the toilet.

There is no filth in this hell-hole,
apart from the stink
of the infant school toilets,
the shit on the seats,
up the walls, the wee
on the floor, the gagging smell
and the chains that don't pull,
and the holding on all day,
all the way home on the bus,
all the way down to the gate,
and the letting go at the sight of home,
the secret washing of knickers,
the silence, the shame.

There is no gore here,
except for the blood in the toilet
two weeks out of every four,
the covert incineration of rags,
and the scratchings and pickings
at sores that don't heal,
the whiff of the hospital ward
made familiar by Munchhausen's proxy.

There are no starving Africans in this story,
rather the lonely stretches of Anorexia,
the effort not to be noticed,
to take up no space,
the strange instinct
to have nothing on the plate,
nothing inside.

There is no hostage taken here,
only the empty rooms,
bare bones, bare boards,
hard back-breaking words,
the shadow of the executioner
on a spirit continually broken.

There is nothing amiss here
but the evil in a mother's eyes,
the torture of a father's silence,
the apathy of sibling witnesses,
the ache of a heart full of hate.

​


My Mother’s Scars

I don’t know about the diagnosis
but I’ve seen my mother’s scars.

I’ve seen the scratching at the itch,
the picking at the scalp,
the fingers roaming through the hair.

I have seen the scabs
when giving her a perm.
I have to wait for sores to heal
or be the one to make her cry
with every searing accidental burn.

I don’t know the diagnosis
but I’ve seen my mother’s scars,
the fingernails as sharp as knives,
the gouging of the unhealed wounds,
the blood running down the thighs.

I’ve seen the strata on those thighs,
the ropes and silvery lines of ancient harm,
the overlay of pinker, shinier traces,
and on the surface of this archeology
yesterday’s half-formed scabs.

Do other mothers
ask their daughters
to cut their nails
so they can’t break the skin?

Or do other girls
live in calm houses
without secrets
and whispered sharing
of shameful sorrows,
ugly truths?

Do other daughters
grip their mother’s wrists
like handcuffs, handicapping
the tearing at the flesh,
the baying of the beast
in hysteria’s la-la land?

While every cell says
look away,
don’t share this private business,
and every thought says
this is not my secret,
I cannot speak of this.

When every tear says
Mummy, Mummy,
don’t be sad,
don’t be bad,
let me hold you,
let me rock you,
let me love you better.

I don’t know about the diagnosis
but I have lived my mother’s scars.

​

Rosemary McLeish is an outsider artist and poet, now living in Kent, UK. She is 72, and after a long hiatus has started writing poetry and regularly performing it again. She likes to exhibit her poetry along with her artworks, and lately has started making zines which combine both. She is working on getting a collection published in the near future, though the “under forty lines” rule is hampering her progress. Some things don’t change.

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