Forge House
for Valerie, in memory of our mother
Betty Greening (née Turner),
born May Whale
He leans out of the door to the forge, holding a smile
that might be simple courtesy or satisfaction
with something he’s made, but could be because of knowing
more than us – about the craft of the smithy, of course,
about the anvil itself, even, there next to him
and what its beak and stern are for. But we know nothing
about the secret of our mother’s birth, which is here
where he – this smith – once lived, who signed the certificate
that gave her first name to oblivion. She is dead
and didn’t know she was born in a forge in Otham
or that her name was beached here on the coast of Kent – rib
I etch into chains of scrimshaw. Her childhood was fixed
to a lathe and she was turned to what we knew. But what
(between one shoe and the next) he knew of the you-shape
crying its luck above him…? Look how his right arm’s wrought.
*John Greening received a Cholmondeley Award in 2008 and a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2010. His most recent collection is Hunts: Poems 1979-2009 (Greenwich Exchange), a selection from eleven earlier books. He is a regular TLS reviewer.
