Poetry Friday - Baby sitting
Poetry Friday has made a surprise reappearance. I have a friend, who is one of those true kindred spirits, who is travelling overseas at the moment on her long service leave (she asked me to come, but, alas, I couldn't do it!), and she sent me an email the other day to tell me about the Hay Festival, which is the largest book festival in the world apparently. She is spending over a week there and has been along to a number of events, some of them poets reading their own poems, and so she went and heard Gillian Clarke, the national poet for Wales. My friend thought I might like Gillian Clarke, so I did a quick google and found the poem below.
It captures that uncomfortable feeling of babysitting so well. I don't not love other people's children, or think they are in any way disgusting, and I quite like babysitting, but there is something very alien about trying to comfort the child of someone else in the night, feeling for them in knowing that you aren't who they want - and I have often sat through babysitting badly hoping the child wouldn't wake, so that neither of us would have to face it. One of my most disturbing babysitting experiences was when a two year old, who was not well, woke up suddenly and unexpectedly found me there (his parents hadn't had a chance to tell him I was coming before he fell asleep), and screamed and screamed at me "I don't like you, I don't like you" over and over again with vehemence, and sobbed and fought me off wildly, so this is a poem for me and for him. (If you go to this website, then under the "for students" tab, you will find some notes on this poem, that explain some of the stranger phrases - I can't make a direct link unfortunately.)
Baby Sitting
I am sitting in the wrong room listening
For the wrong baby. I don’t love
This baby. She is sleeping a snuffly
Roseate, bubbling sleep; she is fair;
She is a perfectly acceptable child.
I am afraid of her. If she wakes
She will hate me. She will shout
Her hot midnight rage, her nose
Will stream disgustingly and the perfume
Of her breath will fail to enchant me.
To her I will represent absolute
Abandonment. For her it will be worse
Than for the lover cold in lonely
Sheets; worse than for the woman who waits
A moment to collect her dignity
Beside the bleached bone in the terminal ward.
As she rises sobbing from the monstrous land
Stretching for milk–familiar comforting,
She will find me and between us two
It will not come. It will not come.
Gillian Clarke