Skip to main content

A Very Male Perspective of the Birthday Woman

She’s in possession!
Shouts her commentators
Seventy minutes gone
Ten to go
Of a big rugby game
The opposition  
Are edging ahead
Suddenly
The maul tide turns
A great shift of energy
inside the pile of men
And the ball
Is turned over
And the opposing team has it
And with it
They break.

(A very male perspective
Of the birthday woman
Who’s starkers single -
Not even the faintest wave
Of a man on the horizon.
She needs the pain;
Wants to know it,
Willing to risk
Post-natal whatever
As a forty candle salute -
In the absence of a child’s
Tip-toed effusion
In which lungs contract
To two sun-dried shrivels - 
Allows an adult’s
Laboured breath
To breathe a wish free.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My Letter Carving Workshop is Now Open for Business!

Life-living letter carver, carve me a letter crisp on my headstone and fill it with wonder I'd like to carve it, but you would do better, for you stand above this earth and I am laid under. - Tom Wiggins My new letter carving workshop is now open for business.  Taking bespoke commissions such as memorials (including headstones and cremation tablets), opening plaques and heraldry.  If you're looking for fine hand-carved lettering designed and carved by a fully trained stonemason and letter carver, please get in touch.   I'd be very happy to talk you through the process from design stage right through to installation.  Telephone: 07791969667 E-mail: tomwiggins86@gmail.com Website: www.tomwiggins.co.uk A bit about me:  Born and raised in Gloucester, I now live and work as a letter carver in the beautiful market town of Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire.  My journey in stone began in 2013 with a three-year Diploma in Stonemasonry at The City of Bath College. Th...

G-Dog Advises Me to Go Big on the Blackberries - a Tommy & Moon Story

It was a few weeks into autumn and I hadn’t had a hair cut since before the summer solstice.  My beard, long and straggly and in desperate need of trimming, was a week away from having birds nest in it.  I unpolished my boots and wore some old jeans that were ripped at the knees and dirty from digging a deep hole on a particularly wet day in Highgate Cemetery.  Hanging loosely over the top of those was a baggy grey jumper I spilt half a bottle of bleach over about three years ago.  I looked a bit of a state, but there was a method to my madness.  Today was the day I was going to ask Moon for a pay rise and I wanted to look as if I’d been trod on. On the morning I was due to ask him, my bike got a puncture not twenty yards down the road from my house. It wasn’t a polite slow puncture so that I might finish my journey on a squidgy but rideable front tyre; the thorn tore through that poor inner tube like a javelin through jelly and it had me riding on a stee...

Norman MacCaig: Poetry Hero

I cannot say exactly when I first discovered Norman MacCaig.  It may have been at the beginning of this year, but could well have been at the end of last.  I found him through a tweet.  Six months or more is a long time on Twitter, and when tweets get to a certain age, they're as stubbornly elusive as a missing person who wants to stay missed. But I know the tweet was left by poet  Jo Bell , the director of National Poetry Day, and whose wonderful blog can be found  here .  The link she left took me to an enthralling 25-minute interview with MacCaig.  I liked the man instantly.  I replied to Jo by saying what how charming MacCaig was.  He had a warm sparkle in his eye that only Scots seem to have access to.  He epitomised charismatic.  Unfortunately, embedding has been disabled on the video, but it can be found  here .  Fast forward to yesterday.  I was sat in Stanman's Kitche...