Muscle Memory (Poetry Monthly)

Cherry

By Noo

Fri, 04 Mar 2016
  • 1885 reads
6 comments
 

 

The boy is dancing carefree

At the pond’s green edge

His mam is the watcher

Hands ready to catch him

If he falls

 

His smile is a chubby sun

It eclipses eclipses

The dance lies deep in his bones

“The sun has got his hat on

Hip-hip-hip hooray”

 

At nine, his mam’s long gone

And his dad casts a long shadow

With his sadness and his fists

One punch, another, another

Anger has its own rhythm

 

When he’s fourteen, the hollow bedroom air

Stands for his dad’s face

On the wall he sees the shadows of fists

As he punches, he spits

“I’ll never be you, I’ll never be you”

 

Twelve years on, he looks at his own son

And his fists twitch

He holds one hand down with the other

Because he knows

Muscle has a long memory

 

And so does sinew and so does blood

But as he puts his son back in his cot

Ears covered to block out the noise

He thinks bone is safe

Bone holds something else

 

In his is the little boy dancing

At the pond’s green edge

The echo of water

And hands ready to catch him

If he falls

 

Certificate 15
Poem

Comments

Submitted by Rhiannonw on

Brief good memories can help, even with the bad memories seeming so strong? And maybe some understanding of the pressures under which his father cracked with loss of wife and frustrations of parenting and how to seek help? Rhiannon

 

Submitted by EB on

Good progression runs through this. At the end, should it be if he fell, or is that deliberate? Could be he still feels he could 'fall' (into father's footsteps). 

Submitted by VeraClark on

This is really potent, I am obsessed with muscle memory and calcite, the implications when pregnant women lose babies and this uses the same principle in domestic violence. 'eclipses eclipses' 'chubby sun' These are just two of the phrases that filled me up. It's the first response I've seen to this month's brief - love it. On fire.

I see what EB means about past tense as it's a memory but it's a circular poem so would you need to end where you start? I assume you want that technical precision. A suggestion I had is if you took remembers out of the last stanza, swapped it for 'sees' or 'imagines' or something eye related rather than time, the tense could still end on falls. How cunning am I. Beautiful, Noo.

 

Submitted by Philip Sidney on

Beautiful, full of the stuff of life - to dance or to violate, to fall with uncertainty that one might be caught. love the fall at the end, on repeat.

Submitted by Silver Spun Sand on

'At the pond's green edge'.  How haunting is that? 

An emotive and thought-provoking response to this month's PM.

Tina

 

Submitted by Bee on

Haven't anything to add. Just wanted you to know I read and agreed with the above comments. Thought provoking, indeed. 

Bee