Diming the light fantastic

 My parents are tiny now. 

They have shrivelled and lost their minds;

separated for more than half a century and by over two hundred miles.

They live in nursing homes cared for by people who have travelled several thousand miles for a better life

of cleaning bums and serving small portions of food to nonagenarians who think they are on cruise ships

or back at school

or dancing in the Tower Ballroom in smart suits and spangled dresses.

'I could have danced all night'.

Quick stepping to the light fantastic as the tide comes in.

It's depressing to see them like this

To see the look in their eyes.

The look of puzzled longing when I say goodbye,

wondering if it will be for the last time.

Joan Bailey 

Earworm

I listen as I sit beside my mother's bed,

which she thinks is a bus, though, unlike me, she is unaware of its final stop.

I sit by this static vehicle and listen 

as she dredges broken fragments 

from a seabed of confusion. 

Her index finger keeping time like a metronome. 

Tick tock. 

Tick tock. 

To and fro. 

To and fro.

Tick tock. 

She's been like this all afternoon

addressing the blank wall, 

ignoring visitors. Her rhythmical babble full of strange surprises:

'Under the Zion Methodist

Under the jelly belly

Milly Molly Mandy. 

As Mae West goes under her vest

Onion jelly 

Under the Zion Baptist 

Zane O' Mally

at the gay call centre

with the yellow rose of Texas. 

under a lilac sky. 

Oh Rachel! Oh Rachel!' she cries. 

Rachel, the grandmother she never met.

Rachel, who took her daughters to Australia 

from where they would return leaving her bones interred in the dry earth beneath the thirsty Queensland sky. 

I remember the lock of Rachel's hair, 

which I found in a little round tin inside a sewing box. 

A careless child: I would curl the auburn strand around my fingers, until it eventually disintegrated much like my mother's mind. 

'O'Mally,' she mutters, 'O' Mally.'

 No one in the family  knows this man  but whatever Mae West is doing under her vest is a mystery best left unresolved. 

As I watch, I hold the yellow rose of Texas in my hand, knowing I will be  earwormed by the tune for the rest of the week. 

Joan Bailey 

Oasis

 We - well, you mostly - created an oasis in our back garden. I helped but in a random way, buying plants here and there but you did the digging, the planting, the tending.

I took advantage of the council's offer of a compost bin. Twenty years of good, rich fertiliser from vegetable peelings. Twenty years of decayed soggy lettuce, sprouting spuds, wet parsnips and wizened  carrots. It made me feel less guilty for over buying and not producing as many home cooked meals as intended. 

You made the little pond for frogs, filling it with tadpols and oxygenating plants with the help of interested friends. 

We left the self seeding Elder, which was little more than a bush when we moved in, to  grow tall. You hung seeds, peanuts and lard cakes for the birds on its boughs.

I saw some gold finches in the clough and a colleague told me how nyger seed would attract them to the garden. Flashes of red, and yellow jostling for places on the feeder. Their high pitched musical twittering a sweet addition and, in the evening, the blackbird's resonant song. 

We - you mostly - created this green space between the high laurels, planted by a former owner, a miserable bugger by all accounts, who wanted to screen out his  neighbours and, in doing so, gifted us this private space, this little oasis visited by hedgehogs and squirrels.

Somewhere to chill. Somewhere to forget the petty conflicts of family or work and the state of the nation with its never ending meaness, injustice and scandals 

Somewhere to screen out thoughts of people being bombarded by bombs thousands of miles away. People whose oases have been ripped up, ripped apart, ripped away. 

Destroyed. 

Thousands of people who have lost those they love. Injured, uncertain. afraid; who have to start over with nothing. 

Joan Bailey 

Herb Robert

Herb Robert has crept in and colonised some pots near the bin without my permission.

Yet I find him to be a welcome addition.

Trust this invader the experts say: he will bring bees and butterflies. Just cut him back if he gets in the way.

Rub his leaves on the skin to avoid midges but never cut his flowers and put them inside overnight or death will surely follow. 

Who would think such as this could herald such sorrow? 

Sources speculate about the origin of his name.

Views differ. 

Some believe he was named for a medieval monk, who used plants and flowers to relieve sickness and pain with their curative powers. 

Or is he named for the puck known as  Robin Goodfellow, the Shakespearian sprite, who circled the earth for King of the Fae on the titular midsummer night?

Whatever...

He can live anywhere: woods. commons, hedgerows, cracks in the pavement. 

He doesn't much care. 

All he needs is some soil, the rain and the God given air.

Joan Bailey 

Mudlark

Rooting through debris like a Victorian scavenger. Clearing a window on the foreshore of time. A glimpse of the past in a piece of old pottery: figures of rowers on broken blue Delft. 

And not  just the boatmen but some unknown person who ate bread and cheese from this long gone plate. Long gone, like the woman who once wore the glass beads displayed like bright sweets on a string long frayed. 

Treasures discarded and washed back up again, long hidden beneath the grey, muddy sand, suddenly illuminated in the light of the morning, as you offer them up in your wet, muddy hands.

Joan Bailey 

Working On It

Autumn, three weeks into term, energy bills like nowhere else in Europe. Liz Truss is PM (How??? Really, how?) 

Equanimity.  Working on it. 

Recipe:

Watch the garden birds, read, peddle on the exercise bike, music, pray for mercy and miracles, love, appreciate those who love me, wine, bit of telly, don't forget the water bottle and eat better. 

Sister-in-law is 80. Off for an Italian meal with family. 

The greatest blow to women's rights in my lifetime

The overturning of Wade v Roe in America is astonishing. It is the most significant reversal  of common sense in my lifetime. Last night, one of my Facebook friends, a wise and thoughtful woman - and a Roman Catholic - with whom I did my teacher training, posted her shock and anger over the Supreme Court's judgement, and expressing concern for her friends in America.  This helped me to express my own thoughts. I am Christian but cannot accept the orthodox view that abortion is a sin. 

I'm a lapsed Anglican and my sister is a converted Roman Catholic. Occasionally, I have attended her church,  most recently when she renewed her wedding vows and for a family funeral. She has been active in the Catholic Church in the past, supporting the bereaved and helping out in other ways and is still quite regular in attendance, even now her kids are grown. I remember one time, after a confirmation service, a woman coming round trying to drum up support for a pro-life thing and my sister firmly saying 'No thank you.' When  the woman had gone. My sister turned round to me saying' I am not into that shit. They have no idea! ' I was so proud of her at that moment.

My sister went  on to work with young single mums who  needed support and later with children at risk of sexual exploitation and she continues to have no illusions about how tough life is.

Abortion is an incredibly difficult thing. It should be a last resort within a nationally funded and supported contraception prgramme. Even though it should be the last resort, no one should feel guilty or be denied the right to a safe, legal abortion. 

I remember reading an article by a female professor, who looked at abortion not simply from the perspective that women should have control over their own bodies  - a given in my book  - but also addressed the pro-lifers with some nuanced arguments, explaining that abortion was, in her view, a necessary evil in a deeply broken world. I have never forgotten this. 

I remember, when I was a young teenager, my mother  talking about how  her own  mother had had an abortion. Grandma's husband was disabled and had been ill for many years. My grandma was the main  breadwinner. He  died when my mother was in her late teens/early twenties. It seems at some point  my grandmother also had a 'fancy man' called Joe. I don't know if this was before or after her husband died but, as a result of this affair, she ended up having a back street abortion, which my mother said was a very dangerous thing to do. I remember asking why and she replied 'because I think they inserted a coat hanger.' For years I had a mental picture of my grandmother sitting on her back step - which she used to make yellow with a donkey stone - dressed in her work-a-day apron waiting for a person  with a coat hanger to sort her problem out.

I remember a little while after this, a friend telling me how  abortion was a very wicked thing  and thinking that could not be true, as the sweetest, kindest, least selfish person I had ever known was my late grandma and she'd had one, even though it could have killed her. I was glad that a woman couid now  get an abortion on the NHS, despite the fact some people made a fuss about it. 

On the overturning of Wade v Roe and the news that half of the states in America will now outlaw the right to an abortion, I feel the need  to express how important our sisters, mothers and grandmothers are and how important is our right to decide for ourselves if abortion is a better option than giving birth. 

The bottom line is this:  abortion will exist as long as  women exist, however offensive certain people find this. It will never be swept away by legislation and moral indignation. The overturning of Wade v Roe will  lead to increased mental misery, even suicide; to increased poverty; to  illegal, unsupervised and potentially dangerous interventions; to the criminalisation of those previously licensed practitioners who will carry on; to  the criminalisation of women.

The righteousness of certain sections of America, who would outlaw reproductive rights, while, in some cases, advocating gun ownership is well know and well commented on. It is quite simply, unfathomable. And to those in any country, who wouid place the rights of the fetus above the needs of the mother, I wouid ask them to consider the bigger picture.