This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License
POEMS by Kathleen Freeman: Legacy for a two year old:
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Preamble:
Two months before my second birthday my mother left me and my brothers and sister in the high street with a note. June 16th 1954.
My mother was fined £10 for neglect and abandonment.
As an adult I obtained my Social Services file, it told me a lot about my history and confirmed some things that I already knew.
By the time I was two I had lost mother, father, brothers, sisters, home and for the rest of those forty years my identity.
I was never to speak of who I was or where I came from, it was forbidden.
This is my story of discovery of myself of my story and memories I can only begin to own through the poems.
This is the legacy of that two year old and the far-reaching consequences of the actions of her ‘parents’.
I hope by sharing my voice in this way I will begin to own more of who I am.
I realised that by shutting these poems away, I was repeating what had been done to me, what had been forbidden me-that of having a voice.
Perhaps you will find something for yourself too.
Maybe by sharing them I will find more words and more of myself.
Poem 1
Legacy for a two year old
If I had realised daddy, that your presence
stroked the rooted pulse of my memory,
I could have sliced it out with neat precision long ago.
Cold scalpel would have perfected this.
I might have better timed my exit from this world.
As each thrust of your whiskied breath
declared me innocent, but dangerous to know.
I should have given it up to God or heaven.
Instead I buried it, overlaid it, as a mother
who’s suffocating breasts hanging empty
resisted the gaping birds mouth, that screeched
and flew up into the comer of the room.
Abandoned, but watching knowingly, eager
for the morning light to wash me through
and begin again, as somebody quite newborn.
If I had known the legacy bequeathed to me
from the dumb loins which I rode upon,
when you came crazy home to play your games.
Perhaps the night could have stopped my hearts beat,
wrapped me in its mothers arms, and sucked me clean
All poems copyright of Kathleen Freeman
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
