I saved the afterbirths...

This week we're very proud to showcase another rich, complex poem from After Babel by Christine Webb. Hope you all enjoy a bit of juicy dark humour - we certainly do, but we're inclined to agree about the grapes.

The Midwife’s Tale

I saved the afterbirths for Mr FitzHughes –

Don’t forget, Sister, whenever you’ve time –

plum-purple, plum-plush-soft… though what with blood,

water, cries (some women shriek like pigs –

It’s good pain, I tell them) and then the soft

head appearing, screwed up face, the tiny

soles of the feet… and that first high wail

strung out on a breath like the bloody cord –

there’s enough to do without packing up placentas

for Mr Mighty FitzHughes. But I usually did.

It’s his research, I thought, important, maybe.

Twenty years he was there. You must come to tea,

Sister, when I’ve retired. Not many say that:

flattered, I admit. And the house – full of small 

expensive things. Now, Sister, the greenhouse

(while his wife made tea) – I especially 

want to show you the grapes. Black, full –

cut me a fistful.  Try these, Sister… and look

down: see that rich soil? Fertile, aren’t they,

those afterbirths you saved? Foot of every vine –

nothing beats them. 

The grapes were almost

bursting in my hand – purple-red, swollen.

I thought, Mrs Jones’s placenta… Never

fancied grapes since.

 

by Christine Webb,

from After Babel, pub. Peterloo, 2004

All I saw was lit up by your body

This week we're delighted to share another beautiful poem by award-winning poet Christine Webb. 

First published in 2011, her remarkable work Catching Your Breath 'celebrates and mourns her partner of forty years, who died in 2006.'

Knowledge

That moment suspended in the dull room

above the streets of the January town

(a branch pecked on the window, but the curtains

shut out the garden of dead chrysanthemums)

– undressing for each other the first time

all I saw was lit up by your body,

its gold and ivory. Such knowledge to bring away,

to carry wrapped through the streets, past naked trees,

into the school where heating pipes clanked and gossiped,

where blackboards expressed decorous equations,

where at the corners of corridors we might breathe in

to pass each other, but did not speak or glance

in case the doorways should break into leaf,

in case the books we carried should burst into flame.

Christine Webb 

  

Women don't write, he said

The remarkable poet Christine Webb has kindly allowed us to use this thoughtful and thought-provoking piece from her 2004 debut collection, After Babel. 

-------------------------------------------------------------

 It was not the fruit

It was not the fruit she took

but the wood

not its flesh she chewed

but a pulpy fibre

(warm in that cavity

so various, ingenious

close to the brain

mother of language

thought shaper)

– spat out, finally

moulded and flattened

into rough leaves

a little bigger than the figs'

and drier

and for ink?

there were the experimental

berries, saps – ground

insects, even –

or the last resort,

the slow ooze

of red.

No problem of what

to say: creation 

all around, bursting

into words... In The 

Beginning... 

A shadow 

fell across the page as 

she squatted, rapt. – Women

don't write, he said

And screwed up her bible

Christine Webb

from After Babel, pub. Peterloo, 2004