Carol Ann Duffy: The Light Gatherer

When you were small, your cupped palms

each held a candleworth under the skin, enough light to begin,

                                and as you grew,

light gathered in you, two clear raindrops

in your eyes,

                               warm pearls, shy,

in the lobes of your ears, even always

the light of a smile after your tears.

Your kissed feet glowed in my one hand,

or I’d enter a room to see the corner you played in

lit like a stage set,

                         the crown of your bowed head spotlit.

When language came, it glittered like a river,

silver, clever with fish,

                          and you slept

with the whole moon held in your arms for a night light

where I knelt watching.

                            Light gatherer. You fell from a star

into my lap, the soft lamp at the bedside

mirrored in you,

                                   and now you shine like a snowgirl,

a buttercup under a chin, the wide blue yonder

you squeal at and fly in,

                                   like a jewelled cave,

turquoise and diamond and gold, opening out

at the end of a tunnnel of years.

This is an ecstatically maternal poem. Carol Ann Duffy seems to discover before our gaze her reverential joy at the miraculous evolution of another human being. The tenderness is palpable and the line, ‘Your kissed feet glowed in my one hand’ is magical!How emotionally humbling is the admission of ‘my one hand’….

All Duffy’s best poems seem to me prayers in ways that reach us and find us, wherever and whoever we are.

Stunning.