Cauldron Anthology Issue 5: Seer Cauldron Anthology Issue 5 Seer (1) | Page 40

Jarrow Doll Laura Potts These penitent nights, chapel-black where the terrace turns its back to the hills, after the wild white fists and the fight, the blood-bite-kiss and the mist of the morning over the dock, in the glowering grey like a sentinel fox I slip in the dawn on and beyond the wharfside-wetland-headland away. Behind, my wound-tight sweat-damp night and a lover whose name I never quite know. Oh dockland dim and fog on the moor, the wind at the water-bridge stops at my corner-whore feet as I turn from that frostshard street and home, a lone lamp dim in the last laugh of night. My Tyne-light mirrors me Madonna gone shy: I who split spines of hills with my stride, the mariner’s wife who watched from the shore that ship ten years too lost. Now, the frost of my widowhood workhouse-dark, my skull holding eyes like cradles carved with a terminal hand, and then when the river moves the moon through the land and I hold something crèche in my canyon again, to rinse off the men from my skin I remember. Before the bairns get in, I am a heavy, bleeding gender. Your medal tender glows on from the hearth, man of my heart, seaman my own. Know only this: though the field sheds its coat to the wind your infants are clothed in the sweet sweet spring of youth, a matriarch lighthouse guiding them home. 40 Cauldron Anthology