Big or small?
My mother is not from Moscow but she very definitely knows how to make the kind of entrance made in ‘Shades of Red’:
Once an actress, my Muscovite mother
knew how to make an entrance.
Striking in fuchsia
she’d arrive late
to my school performance,
call my name. Wave.
Have trouble finding her seat.
And like the child in this poem, I would ‘glow crimson / and turn into the smallest / version of myself’.
Whenever my family took a holiday, on our return home a photograph of my mother would inevitably appear in the local paper accompanied by an article about her winning the holiday camp beauty, ballroom-dancing or talent contest. And like Teika
I was never mentioned,
except as a side note:
Mrs Smits lives in Windsor
With her husband and two daughters.
How fortunate for mousey-haired me.
[‘An Early Lesson in Fake News’]
Again, I would make myself as small as I possibly could. So reading these poems reminds me how different people have the power to make us feel big or small: emotionally, spiritually, literally and metaphorically. Or perhaps I should say we let them have this power.
In ‘Our Last Conversation’ the author and her father are discussing how quickly scientists might ‘make medics microscopic / saving lives in miniature.’ The poem ends: ‘How was I to know that for my father, / they were already too late.’ It's a line that makes me curl in on myself and shrink…. shrink… shrink.
I feel exactly the same as I read the repeated statement ‘My world stops’ in ‘The Pulmonary Embolism’.
[…] he falls and thud! My world stops.
[…] ‘I fell,’ he says. My world stops.
[…]‘It’s just a fall.’ My world stops.
And I shrink yet again when I hear Teika’s father speaking in the poem about conference pears:
Her father would crunch
His way through the bowl saying,
‘We need to eat these up.’
Yet she had no taste for them.
The flesh was too hard, the skin too bitter
Poetry can have the same power as human beings to affect how big or small I feel. This is the proof of it.