Poem 34

I started waiting for Halley’s Comet from the moment I heard it came back every 76 years – I would have been eight or nine so almost twenty years of waiting … in the event it was a fizzler … but my squinting into the hazy night sky found a strange echo in the ultrasound …

… the overwhelming mode of poetry was and still is confessional and that was just one of my problems struggling to fit into the milieu – I had strong dramatic instincts and in search of a poem would make up situations and characters which were not my lived experience … this poem is key in my development because of the way it powerfully fused my growing expressive ability to what was personally and emotionally mine to express …

Ectopic Pregnancy

On the Friday night that you went to bed early
I went outside to look for Halley's Comet

I stood shivering looking up seeing nothing
not the 'fuzzy ball'
described each night on the news
or the great arm of light promised me
as a child
           the stars seemed empty

the next afternoon you lay fighting not to faint
as the specialist called back in his Saturday clothes
pressed the ultrasound scanner against your belly
I gazed at the screen
                        into the night sky inside you
trying to make something out
grey landscapes passed under his hand vagueness
curled on itself

hidden held tight
the comet burned inside you
a pinprick ice-like in its determination
with a jolt of its electric tail
it moved our lives aside
and blazed through