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Christine Laennec
Christine Laennec is an Oregonian living in Aberdeen. She is a mother and an academic.
Poems
LETTER TO A GAELIC LEARNER
Come to the islands:
here are some things you can learn.
Culla Bay in all different weathers:
on sunny days with children scampering,
on stormy evenings when the seaweed
looks blood-red in the swell,
at times when periwinkles are plentiful
and when the sands are scrubbed bare.
You can learn about waiting:
hear the gossip in the queue at Buth Neilie's,
watch for the angled rainstorm to arrive,
accept the long silence before the first hymn
and the days when the mail can't get through.
Above all you can learn about friendship:
renewed from visit to visit,
offered by those with no need
of your halting conversation
full of mistakes and goodwill.
You can learn a lot by the fire
listening to the clock tic-toc
in between Granny's comments on the weather,
or on a walk past the bobbing bog cotton
accompanied only by the wind
and the rasping of the corncrake.
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I SNAP
Phone rings –
maybe they caught an earlier train!
But no, it's Matt
making a Courtesy Call.
So Matt, how's your Ma doing?
Oh I was just wondering.
A low-interest loan you say?
Actually the thing I'd really like to know
is what you had for breakfast today.
They say porridge is good for the heart.
Why am I asking you all this?
I thought we might as well make
wasting time
and fraudulent personal contact
a mutual thing.
Matt?
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TWO MOTHERS
There next to her he squirmed and kicked
In one small room he howled, unanswered
Until eight placements later,
after due consideration,
He was placed in my heart, with me.
Now here next to me at the children's clinic
He waits with crossed arms and surly kicks
For the annual check
On badly healed bones
And talk of reconstructive surgery.
Where he once looked to her
For food, warmth and life
He now scowls at me
To leave him alone, for God's sake!
Walking past the psychiatrist's door,
He refuses to go in:
We do this dance once a week,
on Wednesdays.
And when in town
Our path crosses hers
As it does on a regular basis,
She beams at him,
And says that she loves him
While over his head – well, if looks could
There would once more be only one mother.
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CHILD COME TO ME
Casting spells
My heart open wide
Yet again
Throwing a net of hope
Over the same deep waters.
And once again
Left with only emptiness
And faint shreds of prayers:
I have been walking along the shore
Pleading with the moon
and the shooting stars
But the further I walk,
And the more moons come and go,
The more I become
The person who does not get her wish:
this one wish.
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THE NINTH LIFE
You may have had lucky escapes before
near misses and brushes with death
while no-one was looking, or no-one was home
But we know about this last one.
The house fell under a shadow:
with phone calls to the vet,
sobbing at inopportune moments
and vacant staring out of windows
where you should have been
until, thinner and trembling with happiness,
you came back.
And now this ninth life
is subtly different from all the rest.
Your funny ways have always been a joy:
Curling trills from the next room
Polite paws on my knees, asking permission to jump up
A friendly fur-face nuzzle, a purring tug on my hair
All these things are just as they were before –
your little body curls next to me in the same old pattern.
Yet you know as well as we do
that now
every familiar touch,
every deep green look of love
has this new dimension
of sweet farewell.
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FOR MAMA
She sang songs to me
which I later found in a tattered book.
Their essences painted in watercolours
brought me back her liquid voice
and held me like she did,
her warm hand stroking the nape of my neck
so that even now
the storms in the valley
the valley so low
are torrents of distilled green and grey
slowly moving across the back garden.
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PHONE CALL
I go she goes
you know that guy
that was at the dance
Friday? I go
yeah she goes so
that's Todd's brother
– I thought I was gonna die –
so I go so
what I know that
– can you believe it? –
Mom goes dinner
I go gotta go
she goes OK
bye I go
bye
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