Roses
Wielding secateurs on Saturday
I hack at roses,
urging the blackspot to be gone
and setting the straggling thorns in check.
My mind turns to you
and how I trained you to eat the undergrowth,
to chew meadowsweet, parade mushrooms
like trophies and cook hogweed with honey,
Not the giant type!
Then I think of the drawn out pause
as we waited for the pompiers,
before explaining the crisis in broken French,
the panic of my sister who had been watching you
by the boundary hedge.
Squirming, I remember my secret smugness
as the playgroup mums deemed me
either interesting or odd,
how I naively believed you’d be well-trained
and would listen to reason just like the rest.
There was the time I dreamt of a shark attack,
to find you biting my bleeding nipple –
we were never short of warnings –
the embarrassment of explaining a scar to a teacher
when you tried your teeth on your brother’s back.
So that summer, I should have known
you’d pick and eat the bella donna,
that I’d force my fingers down your throat in calm terror,
whilst mouthing impatient prayers
and observing the size of your pupils,
and later, how we were all soothed to be told
that it wasn’t the deadly kind.
But even now, you would still gobble
your way through the entire garden,
have your mother’s once fearless heart on a raspberry leaf.
Grabbing the prized roses,
you ask, Can I eat these?
You don’t wait for an answer.
I never did like roses.
Clare Currie was Peterborough Poet Laureate 2017-19, is a playwright, a founding member of Syntax poetry festival and associate artist of Jumped Up Theatre. Her writing often focuses on the visceral nature of being embodied as female – a sportsperson and mother.