What Part of Me?
Sun demands a front row seat above the graveyard through the trees
when my mother’s placed in soil, surrounded by her friends’ small talk –
She must have sent the rays for us. Women in their Sunday best, men
in greying suits gather at the grave, heads down, hands lost in heart-
shaped garlands. Someone says She was so kind. I want to shout
You didn’t know the half of it! but wailing stops me from repeating
words she used to say – I never wanted you. Abortion doesn’t seem so bad.
That was when I left the final time. Her friends begin to nudge me
to the edge. Am I meant to jump? One says Give your mum a final word.
I hear the hum of cars, muffled by the trees, blink looking down to know
she’s trapped, sun shining off the lid. Will she push it back, stand up to shout
Go away again? I cannot speak so mouth the words she used to say. Ugly
goes into her grave. Bad. Too fat. Too sensitive. I turn but am called back,
could swear it is her voice that says What part of you has gone into the grave?
Jenny Mitchell won the Gregory O’Donoghue Prize 2023, and the Poetry Book Awards for Map of a Plantation, a Manchester Metropolitan University set text. The prize-winning collection, Her Lost Language, is One of 44 Poetry Books for 2019 (Poetry Wales). Her latest collection, Resurrection of a Black Man, contains three prize-winning poems.