Out of my Mother's Country

Out of my Mother's Country

My mother wants to sell me her bad luck,
that field at Kerderrien, never used for much,
so we sit in the notaire's office, discussing
who owns the storm-struck house's stones,
close to The Justice cross-roads.
Memory just remembers.

I've childhood memories of gatherings in French Lane
outside the Charcuterie, and trips to Brittany,
the benches and earth floors;
coffee in bowls, and milk from cows direct,
and grandmother chasing a chicken with an axe,
an eye-less rabbit hung in a doorway, like a jinx.
The stories are invented later.

The rich Parisians own the houses now,
buying someone else's past, making it their home,
re-inventing 'Country' warm and clean,
not knowing that the flooding mill stream
used to run around the houses,
and the mud would ruin everything;
never having to carry their good shoes
and leave their muddied boots in a field.
Beware, the supermarkets are selling someone else's dreams,
in peasant cooking packaged cling-film clean.
Memory just remembers.

Out of photographs stiff with posing,
the coifed grandmothers peer silently through,
at another country wedding, in an unlucky field.
The dead watch us now from photos,
making them less easy to forget,
the past and future using the same set.
They make us finish their stories.
The stories are invented later.

We follow a line of Breton saints to the chapel;
above the flooded tunnel to the Manor
skeletal Ankou leads the Danse Macabre
in plague memento mori painted on the walls,
nudging us to take our partners for the dance.
I'm growing out of the past,
it is never more than a shade away,
like lines of children's heights marked on a door.
Memory just remembers.
The stories are invented later.

(This poem was placed equal second in the Jersey Evening Post Writing Competition of 1997.)

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