Ogre

You’re not stupid, you,
sifting the truth of things through your teeth
spitting them into a tissue tucked discreetly up your sleeve
for future grudges. Blackmails? Yes;
you’re not averse to dirty tactics.

We’ve all had misdemeanours dug out, unfolded,
pinned up on the corkboard when we least expected it.
You sent me out into the world with a rattling box of tin-tacks,
a precise moral taxonomy, scales exactly calibrated.

And was it harder, when you refused
to put on the baby voice, when you insisted
on a bravery I didn’t feel?
Of course it was. Life is.
Harder than other mothers admitted. Unfair.

But I saw your arms flex with the heft of invisible swords
even as the night hissed into scaled flanks, caught fire.
Perhaps I would have preferred
a little more french-plaiting and fairy cakes,
but you saw that I was a girl-child in a world
that would have had me trussed up and stuffed
in a trice.

So you set to work
with your crimping shears and your microscope
teaching me to recognise
the thousand varieties of doormat
that you didn’t want me to be.

All the while dealing with the wailing gobs of your other nestlings;
smiling, gritting, telling them not to flinch as you
splinted wings, stapled new ones onto their back
told them: No, there is no easy way,
I cannot wave a magic wand.
No magic – but yet you managed to launch them
so that they spiralled upwards
sycamore seeds given a second chance at flight.

I grew up the doorframe in pencil notches and diary pages
then in swung fists, smashed glass. I always lacked
your scientists’ cool demeanour, and perhaps
there were times when you wondered
if you’d done the right thing
if a sprinkle of old-time manners, a pinch more sweet
might have been worth the risk.

Because if you were the ogre in the house
I was the harpy
battering nightly against the Velux windows
keeping you awake, raised hackles and ruffled feathers.
You shuddered at the dinner table
over where my claws had been.

After the years of spitting and straining,
we have found a different set of rules now, and mostly keep
Our faces tuned to human, our hearts to a softer beat.
I am taller, stronger. I can tuck you under my chin.

And always:
The lurch of the ground being left behind
as your strong arms hurled me up into the sky
confident
that I would manage to find my wings.