I recently read, and very much enjoyed, Mary McCallum’s new poetry collection Tackling The Hens. Mary has kindly given me permission to republish “Boy”, one of my favourite poems from the collection, on my blog.
Mary says: “Paul Heyes, whom I wrote about in the poem as inspiration for naming my son Paul,
died not long after my poetry book was published – but before he did I was able to share the poem with him and his family and, later, to read it at his funeral. We’d lost touch but the poem helped bring us back together, something I didn’t expect but am hugely grateful for.”
Boy
A fierce courage brewed in him. He lofted balls
in astonishing arcs and tried to show me how,
gently, ball after ball at Ben Burn Park, an extra
chromosome making him miraculous. He genuinely
wanted me to throw well, felt I had it in me, just
couldn’t understand why I didn’t get the hang of it. Hah!
The laughter busted out of him and he tried again,
gently. ‘Like this. Here, watch me.’ And the arc of the ball
was magical, the way it fought gravity, rose and curved,
as the earth curves, as we curve with it—fell. His throws
not mine. I didn’t have it in me on the impossible grass
my memory conjures up—an endless sward under
a picture-book sun—the impossible ball, a bunch of us
hanging out and Paul. It’s no accident we have a son
who carries the same name, for surely a name is a blessing,
something to grow into, as a plant does, or a rare species
of bat. With time—oh the luxury of that—our boy
becomes a lofty being with curious and humorous mind,
a mighty mane of hair, no aptitude for throwing (shame
on the mother who didn’t think to show him how) but
with a wild passion for cricket. And—there he is!—
gentleness and kindness in all his dealings and the same
way of meeting life on his own terms. In the next room,
his fingers coax song from the throat of a broken, now
mended, Les Paul. Each phrase he plays, a fierce
and miraculous arc of sound.
