! The Un-Ked Poem by Michael Shepherd

Words are like unicorns –
come from nowhere
without any one’s permission or request
because there’s a need for them.

Whose painful, sudden, desolate need
called this word to be?

Market gardeners pushed further out of towns,
their customers now too far a wagon-ride away;
sheepherds too, pushed further out of valleys
to the barren windswept hills;
refugees from starving lands across the sea;
the many orphans motherless from too many birthings,
childbirth fever, fatherless from cotton-lung;

all these knew what unked meant;
but they had lived with it;
it strikes with sudden, hope-drained emptiness
the comfortable, too, when they least expect it;
it can visit monks and other religious and devout,
praying in their solitary cell;
even parish priests about their rounds; or
princesses, put into cold storage
until that right dynastic husband is found;
princes, knowing that they one day must rule
after their hated father’s hated rule…

the Psalmist knew it strike his heart;
John of the Cross called it
the dark night of the soul; Rilke said,
leaning over the chasm of myself..

say the word, sound it, roll it round your mouth,
savour its sour aftertaste; live it for a moment.
What does it tell you?

A little like ‘unfed’ – and that they often were;
‘unshod’ – and that often, orphans were;
‘ked’ – a short word with the certainty
that it’s known exactly what it should be;
so when it's missing, we know just what's lost..

or maybe, just a curt, abrupt abbreviation
for ‘uncared for’… its suddenness
beyond all family and friends then, in that moment,
a desolation of the soul; no ease from god or man;

you’ll know it; or you won’t:
unked.


[a Lancashire dialect word, which Mrs Gaskell found invaluable]