Monday, February 04, 2008

strong coffee and a deep breath

(journal collage)

*

for the beginning of the year - I know we are a month in - but today is the first day of school etc. so it feels like the year in the sense of the daily routines begins today.

I had a rough parenting day yesterday - the kids weren’t particularly ‘bad’ or demanding - I was just feeling so much like I wanted some quiet and space. Quiet and space are so hard won when you have small children. Anyway - it all ended OK. We bought bedtime forward a little, I had a nice phone call with a friend and crawled into bed by 8.30 pm with a good book. Whew.

Here’s a poem:

TENANTS

These two guys live in our house.
They follow us around and they
ask far too many questions.
They expect food, regularly.
Thoughtful food - not just tea and toast,
and they won’t go to sleep when we are tired.

Four people live in our house now.
A small house. The best we could afford.
Some days I would like to get on my bike
ride through the square and keep on riding
right out of this flat, cross-hatch town.

But those two boys who live with us now,
they would be sitting at the table
waiting for tea. They would get hungry. No,
they would probably eat biscuits. They
wouldn’t go to sleep in the right beds.

Simpler to stay. They need their dinner
and I couldn’t begin to explain
that I didn’t want to leave them-

the way that when you are hopping rocks
in the river, you don’t jump
to the next rock
because there was
something wrong with the last.

***

love the cross hatch town image. i keep on thinking auckland’s like that, but the grid’s a mirage; it’s really a plate of spaghetti

Brilliant, Helen. The last stanza kind of brings you up short—different to the soft humour, but necessarily stark and accurate. Love the way you have described ‘the boys’ etc. Lovely that you share this poem. Please share more poems as and when you want.

so true...my tenants would eat ALL the ice-cream, natural nut bars, and fruit. they’d bust the noise control regulations, play the drums way into the evening and then fall asleep in my bed.

I, mostly, quite like the cross-hatch organisation of this city - it’s feels somehow reliable, dependable. The bank will always be in the place where I remembered it being. But then, every once in awhile, I long for spaghetti.

My computer has power!

xx

i love that poem!
i can totally imagine feeling just the same when i have kids-

I like this

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