Domestic

Some families are sedate and harmonious and others are more discordant. We were a passionately argumentative lot. Looking back it would be easy to focus on the quarrels - but underneath it all, something I understood less as a child than I do now, there was an abiding love underlining all the squalls in our family voyages.

So this poem is about love and conflict.

Domestic

Sink-clashing words stamp past

the dinner discussion.

A view, a notion raised over hot soup

that blew out of all proportion

and landed, shattering

tense shards across the kitchen floor.

He is thundering now.

A bit of smoke escapes from his lips,

a cloud of hot air,

before he kills the butt

on the crust at the side of the plate

that she swoops in to take and drown

in silent suds, holding it down until

all resistance is gone

Having lit the fuse, we scatter,

take the table cover to shake away

the crumbs of domestic order,

out the door into the garden

where little bird families are getting settled

for a cosy night in.

Thick air wraps through the house

A warm scarf stifling the mild evening.

Homework bound we're shaken up, focused

on the growing craze of cracks that zip across

our maths books and spelling lists.

Trying hard to find a way to use romance and

reconciliation in a sentence.

Pen poised, I remember one night when

sleep-slippered, I wandered through my dreaming house

and found the door ajar to a porch of stars

and their silhouette - a carved caress of

loving arms and bending heads

against an enormous Looney-Toons moon

and grateful, I breath it in

the reverie of their love