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 | Yorkshire Times A Voice of the Free Press |
Steve Whitaker
Features Writer
@stevewhitaker1.bsky.social
12:00 AM 27th June 2025
arts
Poem Of The Week: Mum Falls Tall By Keith Fenton
Mum Falls Tall
What did you look like to him? This strapping
buck with Brando looks on the Naples waterfront,
a Wild One jacket, Prada shades, on a sloping
black Ducati plinth after an 80-yard drag,
your snapped-strap bag in his hand, a smirk of triumph.
You, more Edith Piaf then Eva Marie Saint,
pelvic crack, late-dusk elbows, je ne regrettes,
a silent brood of frail defiance
that seems to tease at the edge of that smirk;
three decades on, after your latest fall, a smear
of blue crimson across slashed conchae contours,
we see Celtic emeralds above, twinkle like a tyrant’s
Kryptonite. All the money that lad ever swiped
could never buy the lesson we now know
he learned, could never buy release from the endless
haunting, forever to see you
with your nose
out of joint.
What did you look like to him? This strapping
buck with Brando looks on the Naples waterfront,
a Wild One jacket, Prada shades, on a sloping
black Ducati plinth after an 80-yard drag,
your snapped-strap bag in his hand, a smirk of triumph.
You, more Edith Piaf then Eva Marie Saint,
pelvic crack, late-dusk elbows, je ne regrettes,
a silent brood of frail defiance
that seems to tease at the edge of that smirk;
three decades on, after your latest fall, a smear
of blue crimson across slashed conchae contours,
we see Celtic emeralds above, twinkle like a tyrant’s
Kryptonite. All the money that lad ever swiped
could never buy the lesson we now know
he learned, could never buy release from the endless
haunting, forever to see you
with your nose
out of joint.
Image by surajbhan Diwakar from Pixabay
The Edith Piaf analogy is apposite here: frail but mentally armoured, imperturbable beneath eyes that flash like Kryptonite emeralds, and resistant to the depredations of age, bruising and infirmity, the mum who ‘falls tall’ reverses expectation by dint of unselfconscious resilience.
The poem’s performative accents – the brutal alliterative swiping of the bag and the sibilant contours of pain – refine the son/narrator’s admiration of his mother in words that might elicit a species of sympathy, if we weren’t also certain of her own inner strength. How, the narrator intones, could the ‘strapping / buck’ not be haunted to contrition by the broken reminder of his own conquest.