Prompt #18 - First Gift

Prompt #18 – First Gift

It seems I am not alone in scratching my memory for a first gift. Hand-me-down clothes. A potty. My panda which I called Teddy. My baby doll BettyAnn. A book from my Grandma called Just Like Me which had pictures of all sorts of baby animals. Then someone's Bunnykins helped me remember my dish. A baby dish that is so heavy that only a Paul Bunyan baby could pick it up and toss it from the high chair tray. It is cream coloured, about eight inches round, with a thick edge. On the back it is stamped Royal Doulton so I expect it came from my Grandmother or perhaps one of her aunts still in England. The decal under the food is a girl in a pink dress and sun bonnet with a watering can watering rows of flowers (an iconic image which still applies to me today.) And surrounding the scene are four lines from a nursery rhyme--Mary Mary Quite Contrary/How does your garden grow?/With silver bells and cockle shells/And mussels all in a row. (Usually, the rhyme says "pretty maids all in a row.")

I have loved flowers and gardens all my life. One of my nicknames was "the flower girl." I loved the challenge of learning to identify flowers which were not local--silver bells, cockle shells, mussels, pretty maids? Were the sea shells just fertilizer? Perhaps some will say that the verse gave me permission to be "quite contrary" which is another thing which also still applies to me today. Then, I learned later, the history of the rhyme. Mary was Queen Mary, King Henry VIII's older daughter, who attempted to reinstate Catholicism to England during her short reign and did so in a somewhat "bloody" way, by executing people who challenged her. Dreaming Casually in WhatDoesHistorySay.blogspot.ca says that the bells may refer to church bells, the shells to pilgrimage (the image of the Camino Way), and the pretty maids to nuns. She adds that the bells and shells may also refer to methods of torture, the pretty maids to those waiting to be beheaded, and that the "garden" which is growing is actually a cemetery becoming more and more crowded with executed subjects. I also learned even later, and am continuing to explore through genealogy research, that some of our relatives were indeed "flowers" in the gardens of Mary or of Henry VIII. So this verse which I saw three times a day for my first few years was an early lesson in the power of art as commentary, and in the power of art as the memory of a people and their history. Stylistically, it is linked to my awareness of the use of rhyme as a memory aid in oral literature, and to the way we associate it now with childish verse or song lyrics.

Many years later (more than 25 years ago) when I was working inside federal correctional institutions, I extrapolated on this verse in a poem of my own. I still like this effort which, if nothing else, is proof of Wordsworth's truism that the child is mother to the woman, or that beginnings are important, or that the past is always with us, or that life is a braid of past, present, and future. All the Best for 2014!


Mary Mary


It's Easter Monday I'm

thirty-nine years old

digging in   delving deeper

preparing the beds

for re-planting

I've collected donations from all my

acquaintances--calla lilies, mission

bells, twinflowers

sweet baby's breath

--how does my garden grow--


Yesterday

rototilling the south plot

struck shard of pottery

which miraculously dug out intact

this morning my fork strikes

tinkle of metal

a tarnished key

dropped by Raven

on the thirty-ninth day

Searching for meaning

I deposit them both into

the dishwasher

Surprised by Joy

they wash up clean

smooth and shiny the little dish

swirls of green and blue a nest

for my key and the one hollow chocolate egg

I have managed to resist


Thirty-nine years old and single again,

a woman over forty has

a greater chance

of being killed by terrorists

than she does of marrying

the clock is ticking   the clock

ticks Lock them all

bombers hijackers kidnappers too

in the west wing

--pretty boys all in a row--

I carry the big brass keys myself

I keep them safe

I watch them grow


Finish this digging

then transplant

Proud lilies crowd out

the bleeding heart   worms

have eaten the cherry tree

I have made this bed I have made

this bed And I am tired

A soaking bath by candleglow

--you are a creature all enraptured--

blue wax drips

into shiny blue bowl

the impression of a key

the key was in the garden

--in the garden wet with rain--

©

Copyright J.M. Bridgeman