Inventing Parents

By Reg Foakes

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9781462842803

Reg Foakes

The author, Reg Foakes, was born in England, but has lived many years in the United States, where he has enjoyed a career as a university teacher, editor, and writer of literary criticism. He does not have much sympathy with the current fashion for verse that is virtually indistinguishable from prose, and prefers mainly to work with stanza forms, regular lines and sometimes rhyme. As Ezra Pound wrote, “Poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music”

Book preview

INVENTING PARENTS

A GIRL IN CALCUTTA

After a time she took for granted the dust, the heat, the babble—

I think that’s how it was most days in the Chowringhee Road—

just one of the girls keeping aloof from beggars and rickshaws,

importantly English, grouped in the shade when possible.

It was cooler in classrooms, where she was taught always to sit

upright as young ladies should, and, orphaned, she learned to sew

exquisite, useless lacy things, modest equipment for

a future it seemed nothing but marriage could accommodate.

Surprisingly little baggage for the long voyage home

cluttered the cabin she shared or her mind as she watched

the ocean retreating past Aden, past Suez, and taking her on

to a point, a hope, a vision she felt she had started from.

The sea-blue emptiness of in between, and the grey swirl

of the Thames, voices speaking a language hard to grasp,

though native to her, and winter, enormous, unforeseen,

her first snow, the pleasure of boots, all the paraphernalia

for getting about the city in crowded trains, finding work,

and then the excitement of money, new fashions and styles.

When the card came for Christmas, signed by the girls,

all thirteen of them, she had forgotten how they looked,

and caught herself musing at the strangeness of their names.

India dissolved into the other, a mythic fading land

in the mind’s heat-haze, as every day she slipped further

into the heart of London, her future now, her domain.

HOMEWARD BOUND

Hyacinth, cobalt, indigo—after garish Indian streets

cool variations of blue, after the shimmering heat

that stretched away as far as she could recollect,

saris flashing red and gold in the dry seasons, leaves

rattling, dust kicking up wherever, and the sun—

she must keep out of the sun—doing terrible things

to her skin, her eyes, her lips, O now, at last,

to sail away into blue, color of the sea breeze,

ruffling and sane, that must be what started it,

while she leaned over the rail as the ship headed out.

Later, after they docked, and she discovered England,

she learned to look without shivering at the cold sky;

furred, booted, and pleased with the black umbrella

that kept out the worst of it, she almost forgot

what the sun could do, and took to living indoors,

avoiding color in gowns, except for a white trim,

a touch of lace at the cuffs. She checked that her rooms

were all painted ice-blue, color of the north,

and rubbed her hands continually to warm herself

in front of a fire, heaped high, and never enough.

WARTIME WEDDING

Cheeky, dodging from the house in football gear

to the distraction of his family, or stalking

his girl out of church to give her no peace until

she laughed and said yes she would, one day she would,

he was certainly a lad. I expect it was the war

sobered him up, going on, no end in sight,

with the days ticking away in uniformities

as years were torn off the calendar. He had to wait

to marry, smartly, when the army gave him leave,

with two years still to serve stuck down in Kent,

the wrong side of the Thames, and anxious always

in case he found his number ordered to the