the calligraphy of coupling.

She strode down the aisle to ‘At Last’ by Etta James,

faced the celebrant like a keen soldier reporting for duty,

her voice shaky yet sure. I do. I do.

‘You may now kiss the mirror.’ Applause. Confetti.

Every single one of the hundred and forty guests

deemed the service ‘unimprovable’.

Especially the vows. So ‘from the heart’.

Her wedding gown was ivory; pointedly off-white,

‘After all, we’ve shared a bed for thirty-two years,’

she quipped in her first speech,

‘I’m hardly virginal if you know what I mean.’

(No one knew exactly what she meant.)

Not a soul questioned their devotion.

You only had to look at them. Hand cupped in hand.

Smiling out of the same eyes. You could sense

their secret language, bone-deep, blended blood.

Toasts were frequent, tearful. One guest

eyed his wife – hovering harmlessly at the bar – and

imagined what his life might’ve been if

he’d responded, years ago, to that offer in his head:

‘I’m the only one who will ever truly understand you.

Marry me, Derek. I love you. Marry me.’

At the time, he hadn’t taken his proposal seriously.

He recharged his champagne flute, watched

the newlywed cut her five-tiered cake, both hands

on the knife. ‘Is it too late for us to try?’ Derek whispered

to no one, as the bride glided herself onto the dance floor,

taking turns first to lead then follow.

Caroline Bird

‘A land where I could be a queen’ – Growing Up

Growing up is hard to do, as the world’s myths and legends have always told us. In Eavan Boland’s quietly anguished ‘The Pomegranate’ the poet compares herself to bereft Ceres, whose daughter was spirited to the underworld for half the year. This mother acknowledges the limits of her power and the bittersweet necessity of letting go. In an intriguing reimagining of the same myth by Nikita Gill, a defiant Persephone embraces her abduction, feeling herself freer on her dark throne than in her mother’s shadow.

These poems introduce us to parents both tender and terrible, and children striving to step out solo. What is childhood but the study of escape and the hope that, once alone, we will find – as Shazea Quraishi writes – that we ‘walked taller, balanced better’? Wide futures and bright lights are calling as these poets fly the nest for freedom.

The Mother

The mother is a weapon you load

yourself into, little bullet.

The mother is glass through which

you see, in excruciating detail, yourself.

The mother is landscape.

See how she thinks of a tree

and fills a forest with the repeated thought.

Before the invention of cursive

the mother is manuscript.

The mother is sky.

See how she wears a shawl of starlings,

how she pulls the thrumming around her shoulders.

The mother is a prism.

The mother is a gun.

See how light passes through her.

See how she fires.

Maggie Smith

Hedgehog

Its leg was not broken. It was not homeless.