New Zealand/England, (b. 1941)
Breast-feeding
- My sister arrived between my father’s brown
- pages, one of us on each arm and hip
- in the flower-decked armchair he filled:
- yes, I sat in the hair of his arm,
- the breeds of the pigs and cattle lit up
- as he turned ‘The Farmer and Stockbreeder’
- tome in his lap, with my bewilderment,
- mother absent at bedtime.
- My sister was born. Everyone recalled
- they made my mother leave the cricket pitch,
- drove her to the hospital,
- she must have her baby, was caught out.
- So there it was not waking to
- the snout of the breast
- which I’d have snapped up
- but it was not decent
- to burst upon the white bathroom,
- pristine enamel, not just tin,
- where she sat on my mother’s white tied apron,
- refused the milky taps.
- I am very drawn to pigs,
- it’s the snouts, like
- that first nipple in the white.
- I’m for piglets feeding
- in pictures, and for real in the long low
- grunting dark of the long-boat barn
- with the roof of grass that drips
- to the ground and holds a world,
- its own world grown in the dead grass.
About the Poet:
Ann Vaughan-Williams, New Zealand/England, (b. 1941), is a poet, social worker and educator. She lived in Uganda until she was fourteen then came to a farming community near Kings Lynn, Norfolk. She studied at London University and worked mainly in London as a Psychiatric Social worker. Then she married and had a family and lived in Raynes Park for many years.
Vaughan-Williams’ poetry arises from these life transitions. The Lines We Trace (2018) is her first full collection since Warming The Stones (1994) has taught Creative Writing in Merton, Kingston and Richmond. She co-runs a weekly writing group in Raynes Park Library. She was an editor of the Long Poem Magazine for five years and has co-edited anthologies for Merton Poets. [DES-01/22]