Honesty
Lunaria annua

Honesty has her green season, her red season,
keeping the next generation in her purse,
close to her chest, held in.

After many moons
I am perhaps readying to speak.
All the windows in my house are broken,
my feet cold, the sapling inner child
forgotten inside me, forgotten.

A pretty penny, a shilling, a judas pence.

The good mother is on the bus, gaze
locked to the infant’s eyes

her breasts stiff and tight
body adjusting the water content
for this wretched heat. With each kiss, she
learns what the child contends with from his skin,
makes him a milky remedy.

Moonwort carries the spiritual associations
of protection, truthfulness, abundance.

A sow stares across the burnt-out grass –
resigned and patient, nipples cracked.

Behind the wire, an elephant
turns head to hind
to nudge a latching baby.       A rhesus monkey
nuzzles her infant into hairy shoulder –
I feel these mothers
doing what I have never known how to do
– to see
only a small face and no more of the world,
or, the world in a small face.                                  To be
another kind of mother.

When the new mums bring their babies to our office
to this day, I dare not hold them.

Honesty has its clear season,
turning to sea glass, veined like our skin.

I want to hold us all as the mothers we never had or were,
we have missed so much gentling.
I want to teach myself
how to tuck small feet under an eiderdown, to press flowers and pick all the
moon-pennies, silverplate, fairy currency –

just a weed, a wildflower in the wrong place,
part of my childhood litany:
daisy, buttercup, pussy willow, willow catkin,
old man’s beard, honesty.

I will pick the seed pods for my child
coins spilling over his lap
the many full moons with their dried out sheen;
let him hold himself rich.

Jenny Pagdin wrote The Snow Globe (Nine Arches 2024) and Caldbeck (Eyewear, 2017).  East Anglian Book Awards poetry winner 2024, shortlisted Mslexia pamphlet competition, highly commended/shortlisted Bridport, second/highly commended/Norfolk prize Café Writers. Magazine publications include Poetry London, Magma, Wild Court.