RIP Maya Angelou #StillIRise

Aren’t we lucky to have had Maya Angelou in our midst, blessing us with her poetry, her life…what a trove she leaves us with.

Sam’s Town

The first time I left the house on my own after my son was born was probably six weeks after the event, when I had mostly recovered from the caesarean. It was the first time I felt able to leave him for five minutes. I walked out of the house on a grey evening and took a few steps around the corner, where I climbed the steps of the footbridge that crosses the roaring A3 and stood watching the traffic zoom by beneath me. On a clear day it is possible to see miles into the distance, see the tallest buidlings in London. I’m not a big Killers fan, I suppose they fall into the guilty pleasures department…but this song was playing at the time, and I had such a sense of euphoria at being on my own for the first time, no baby in my arms or in my tummy, but also knowing that I’d got through what turned out to be a very difficult birth and the first few weeks of motherhood. It was the first time I turned my thoughts back to the outside world and thought, “What am I going to do now?” This tune popped up on my IPOD yesterday and took me back to that moment, over six years ago, and to many moments after.

“I’ve got this sentimental heart that beats…”

The War on Women

I’ve been trying to keep this blog for poetry but I feel so disturbed and appalled by what is happening to women in the United States of America, that I am going to start posting about it here.

A fifteen year old girl is being accused of murder because she had a still-born baby at 36 weeks of her pregnancy. She faces a life-sentence…as I saw this, my father read this to me, from today’s Guardian newspaper: “…where infant mortality is on a par with Botswana…”. Where? Mississippi…where the above girl is being criminalised for losing her baby.