Bonding
I carried you home as if you were
an extra bag I might have required
while taking my time over shopping —
both of us newly hatched
on the sun-filled hospital ward.
By the time I arrived
in the kitchen, the men had already begun
on the summer’s abundant purple crop,
bowlfuls, panfuls, partly washed,
the fermentation under way,
the necks of demijohns
gaping for more.
Hard at their sticky task,
the father and uncle you’d yet to meet —
my bought-for-the hospital slippers,
bonding with the lino.
Jenny Hockey is a Sheffield poet and former academic. In 2013 New Writing North awarded her a New Poets Bursary. After magazine and anthology publications since 1985, Oversteps Books published her collection, ‘Going to bed with the moon’ in 2019. jennyhockeypoetry.co.uk