You are currently browsing the writing category

Tiller hand

  • Posted on September 17, 2014 at 9:29 pm

tiller hand   on polished wood
imbued with salt   worked
a partnership   seaward or home
familiar   this practical bond
shared   between many
tillers   hands
 
so present   comfortable
her hand   on my knee
a reassurance   leaning, home
familiar   this practical bond
shared   between many
sisters   hands
 
toes, connected   knees
shoulders soft   strong
a belonging   through journeys
familiar   this practical bond
understanding   we need
tillers   hands
 
tell her hand   on polished knee
salted by eyes   she steers
a journey   no harbour, no beach
familiar   this practical bond
because we are   many
sisters   islands

 

2014 © Andie Davidson

Continue reading Tiller hand »

Care to leave a comment? »

Hold this day

  • Posted on July 27, 2014 at 4:09 pm

This poem, also from my collection Realisations, predicts the feeling of completing surgery, even before I began living full-time in my authentic gender. Would it be like this? I didn’t read it for a very long time, I actually thought it a bit presumptuous. I read it two days after coming home from hospital. I cried. I would not rewrite a single word.

Hold this day, this birth day
write it in your diary, send me cards.

Never has a vaginal passage
delivered such a child as this –

she is an inversion of another
a restoration, a renaissance.

And this is her day, emerging
without cries, or protest, or recoil

but claiming birth-right almost
in defiance of everything umbilical –

with pain, blood, trauma and delivery
come to claim her world, her way.

Waking, ethereal, calm, complete
from mists of anaesthesia, almost in

disbelief at her prior parent, pregnant
with this progeny lain so long –

a gestation – no, an indigestion,
an indignity of containment.

I grasp this day, this birth day
red date in every diary, calendar

every future memory, mark and
milestone – and slip into life.

 

2012 © Andie Davidson

Continue reading Hold this day »

Care to leave a comment? »

Psychiatrist

  • Posted on July 27, 2014 at 3:56 pm

I wrote this long before I met my first psychiatrist for assessment at a gender clinic. In the event it was a female consultant, but apart from that, I still don’t think I’d change a word. It reflects the impossibility of one human being really knowing another, and of trans people having somehow to convey an authenticity beyond their outward appearance, and being afraid of getting it wrong. You feel perfectly sane, but an expert may well declare you delusional.

I know who I am.
He doesn’t.
He looks at me through spectacles
of iridescent doctorates
and asks me all the formal questions.

Insulated from each other –
the right answers
to his necessary enquiry
prepared for diagnosis
are in his head long before mine.

I am afraid.
Of prior knowledge.
Of dire knowledge. Gnosis.
Dire gnosis. DSM.
I am becoming disordered.

I know who I am.
He doesn’t.
He sorts me into boxes,
typecast for his report
or an exam for him to pass.

I tell it as I am.
He gazes –
the interested professional
sizing my life, or do I mean seizing,
for where he thinks I fit.

I know who I am
in my head.
In his hands I’m not certain.
He gives a lot less away than I must.
My conviction is not my sentence.

 

2012 © Andie Davidson

Continue reading Psychiatrist »

Care to leave a comment? »

Realisations

  • Posted on July 8, 2014 at 10:57 pm

There is never a choice, but only many choices
never a coming out, rather many revelations

and never a realisation, just one after another again –
as a morning veil withdrawn across the sky

with that natal, waking, feeling of something new,
like the wonderful unfolding of flowers.

***

She waits quietly in a place she has made her own
able only to be what dawnings have revealed

and through the choices, the constant revelations
the realisations, the makings of herself

one thing holds true: the bud, the early flower, dew
were never seen – the morning but a dream.

***

Now never more real, never more ready for life, one
single sadness: she has never been loved.

Not taken, not possessed, not seduced, persuaded or
taken home – but met, embraced and wanted –

even desired, simply for who she is, without sense
of being tainted, but rather, perfumed by her love.

 

2012 © Andie Davidson

From the book, Realisations

Continue reading Realisations »

Care to leave a comment? »

Because

  • Posted on June 28, 2014 at 9:00 am

Because you were the one with whom I knew the need
to scream, and cry, unfathomable, come to you to feed.

Like the one who had been there, when rich, in health—
and now such sickness of this heart, diminished wealth

because yours were the breasts I held, loved, blessed
and envied, reliably, faithfully, each night at rest

because you were the one whose girls’ nights out
meant anything but me—at home alone in doubt

changing, glamorous, unnoticed, pearl in shell,
waiting to be pierced, for the wand, the spell.

 

Because I wanted you to be the one to say
that I look lovely in my dress and pearls

because I wanted you to see the change in me
that makes me wholly one of all the girls

because I wanted you to be the one to hold
my breasts, admiring how they’ve grown

because I wanted you to be the one just there
bonded, welcoming, to this my home.

Like our babies you bore, whose unnerving screams
and unfathomable nights destroyed our dreams.

 

2013 © Andie Davidson

Continue reading Because »

Care to leave a comment? »