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I got this having read some of the poems in the Forward 2010 collection.
Two of the other poems…
Aitken Drum
The older children carry their own drips and lines
down the corridor for activities. Music today,
two people with guitars and a box of percussion
bash out Aitken Drum, once through for each child.
Between choruses they ask for names,
try to pick up the whispers.
You can’t join in. You’re too young to lift your head,
even if the sound of the gently shaken tambourine
didn’t upset you, the way all noise upsets you, even if
you stopped crying, the light stopped hurting your eyes,
if you wore, and told me, in a whisper,
your secret name.
My Children
were never going to be like that, egg-white
in sunlight, who refuse food, refuse sleep,
projectile vomit, have teeth full of holes,
have special food in sealed containers,
use three dummies at a time, who, when they slip
and fall in the rain, run full pelt down the street
away from me, and won’t be comforted.
I was never going to have children who did that.
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