Autumn Writing Workshop
We concentrated on Matthew Finn’s exhibition for our second Autumn workshop, reading Seamus Heaney’s lines from Clearances that begin, like so many of Matthew’s photographs, in the kitchen:
When all the other were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes…
We were in the company of a very different mother with Julia Kaldorf:
I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital…
and with Ruby Robinson we meet a mother and daughter on a sad yet momentous day out, a day of escape from the psychiatric unit:
…She said she’d been talking to Jesus and God
because she didn’t want to go to hell, although,
she said, correctly, we’ve been through hell
already, haven’t we..
And we saw the frail ageing and motherly concern in the elderly mother in Richard Jarette’s My Mother Worries About My Heart.
There was a sort of mediation between the poems we read aloud and then the reverence with which we looked at Matthew’s photographs each of us contemplating what it means to be an adult child, to have a mother, all those things unspoken, unsayable.
We finished with our own messages for our mothers, one of which, by Gareth Roberts, read:
I’m inspired by the way you coped with Dad’s death.
I’m inspired by the way you set about reinventing yourself.
I’m inspired by the way you used technology to find someone.
I’m inspired that I can’t spend Christmas with you.
I’m inspired that you are happy again.
For links to the poems we read for Mother:
From Clearances by Seamus Heaney
https://apoemforireland.rte.ie/shortlist/clearances/
What I learned from My Mother by Julia Kaldorf
http://etyistheword.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/what-i-learned-from-my-mother-julia.html
My Mother Worries About My Hat by Richard Jarette
http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/columns/detail/572
My Mother by Ruby Robinson https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/57459