Maeve Hughes
Poem About Your Mother’s Mother
Babies’ hands were always trying to get
into my mother’s mouth. She would talk
around them, like my father talked around
his cigars. We stopped remembering
how she looked without levitating hair. At night,
after we had brushed our teeth, she would play us
piano. We swam in the music, upstream
to bed. Her hands would follow
us there for a moment’s rest on
our foreheads. Sometimes her belly
grew big, like a red road sign
caution, children, slow.
On our way from breakfast
to the bus we’d listen to the beat
of the baby’s fist against her drum.
Maeve Hughes lives in a tall house in Wellington. She has studied Fine Arts and Creative Writing. Her first publication Horsepower won the 2018 Story Inc Prize for Poetry and is set to be launched in October.