You are currently browsing all posts tagged with 'poetry'.

Trans parent

  • Posted on March 15, 2012 at 4:23 pm

There is nothing so opaque as being
a trans parent. And yet, in familiarity,
they see right through you. Able only to see

in a distance who you were, without
resting on your heart. It’s hard
to understand whether a father left off

caring, understanding or being strong
when somewhere, inside this not-mother
a voice speaks, vulnerable as they.

I shall never pass here, only be different –
as if swallowed, digested, absorbed
by someone uninvited to their home.

I have become thin – a veil on their whole
lifetime, from first blue-eyed recognition
to this struggle with a strangeness.

So thin, so hard to focus on, that I am
deep as an ocean, clear as water, a sea
through which a seahorse passes unseen.

2012 © Andie Davidson

From the new collection Realisations.

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Front page news

  • Posted on February 8, 2012 at 9:22 am

David Walliams swam 140 miles up the Thames for sports charity in September 2011. He did in fact save a dog on his way. The articles appeared in The Metro on September 13.

On the day a man swims the Thames
and raises a million for all those miles,
a boy, 10, goes back to school a girl.
Together, they are front page news on every seat
on trains in and out of London today.

And tomorrow, one will have a bath
and be glad he’s going nowhere except
to a fluffy embrace, be dry, warm – and will
reminisce about the day he also saved a dog,
and talk, and tell and forever be – the man
who swam the Thames.

The other has plunged into a turbulence –
white water with only his body board, and miles
ahead, so many miles, and his alone to leave behind,
in swirling judgement of parents unwilling to see
the reach of an unfamiliar stroke, of a girl
in a class of her own.

One page – picked up, picked over, passport of a morning
and tired but persistent on the journey home –
carries its stories to three million hands (and a million
pounds for the courage in a river no surprise) –
but the courage of a daughter born a boy?

Reported ignorance, condemnation, shock and taunts –
protests at ‘lack of consultation’ by the school
reflected in uncharitable commuter chat and chafe –
and the prayers of many quiet knowing hearts in stations
everywhere, who have travelled home this way before.

2011 © Andie Davidson

From the new collection Realisations.

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Jerusalem

  • Posted on February 4, 2012 at 8:08 pm
This one is about living a dual-gender life, where you can’t always live in your authentic gender, but out of love and compassion revert to what is comfortable for another for a while. This is what it can feel like to take yourself apart.

Peace and Jerusalem come to mind –
the hair a bowl in my hands
cooling, and laying to rest while
still filled with my thoughts – my
heart sinking to the floor with my
skirts and the rose-framed spectacles
on the bed now framing down-cast earrings,
bracelets, beads, small-time watch.

Cotton pads become my face, but
all smudged, blurred and blended,
all lips and eyes, the foundation
of an abstract, discarded and limp –
while a man’s face examines me
from the bathroom mirror, tells me
the bra must go with its silicone
bounty for a plain, striped shirt.

The unheard ticking under the
pink face behind the rose-framed
lenses the shape of eyes, oversees the
truce of the refugee woman who does not
exist outside her timeframe, placed
as she is in a holy time that is not
Jerusalem except that it is contested behind
a wailing wall with prayers for peace.

And for the sake of peace she is in
retreat, falling to pieces, shedding to
lighten the burden as she flees away
to secrets, first spread in colours on the
bed where she cannot rest, then folded
gathered, rolled and ark-ived wholly
without covenant or promise except my
benediction: you shall never be denied.

2011 © Andie Davidson

From the new collection Realisations.

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Shoes

  • Posted on January 30, 2012 at 7:00 pm

There’s a boy in my son’s class
who wears girls’ shoes.
Next term, we’ve been told,
he is Katie.
My son has no problem with this.
I said: He is Katie?
My son has a new girl friend;
he says she’s funny.
And happy now
she wears girls’ shoes.

Parents stand, all jeans and
coloured t-shirts in the playground
and wait in trainers
for the bell.
I wonder what I’m training for
as Katie and my son
run bursting out
for Mum.

They part to race to me,
to her. She stands,
perhaps in training too, but
wearing sandals and a skirt –
pretty as a flower.
She stands alone, with
Katie in his shorts and shoes.
What does he know?
He waves to my son,
takes her hand
and skips away.

Mum!
You could wear pretty shoes too!

I could.
But it isn’t uniform
and I am in trainers
pretending to learn.
Katie’s mum
moves on
trailing eyes and opinions.
Katie has a friend.
So does my son.
I hope he’s happy
in his shoes.

© 2011 Andie Davidson

From the new collection Realisations.

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