Some Blues (In Memory Of My Mother) Poem by Rebecca Irvine Bilkau

9.42 and I’m banking through leaf-mould
and memories, waiting to swap weather
with my mother: she likes to check the skies

are holding up, now we live so far
apart; and I might say, today it’s the blue
of elsewhere, not Lancashire

nor even the well-behaved home counties;
or I might say, it’s the blue of the pansies
in her winter tubs, frailer than hope

but battling on; or I might say,
today the blue is nearly green,
like the plaster horse in my mother’s house

selling Blue Grass, a perfume no-one
recalls, but smacks of fairyland to mum
and me; or I might say today

the sky is the blue of the sweater
I rescued before she threw it
to charity and kept for twenty years

against hard times, when I needed
comfort, and the scent of a mother;
or I might say today the sky is the blue

of Fra Angelico’s angels, or the robes
his Madonna wears in my memory;
oh, tomorrow I’ll check in again,

with ma, ask if the monk had the shade
quite right; and find out how blue the sky
might be, up her way.