Jessica Tenth of May

I was moved to write this poem, purely and simply because of the very special and unexpected effect the birth of my first Grandchild had on me. It was the first poem I had written in recent history, although that ‘history’, it has to be said, was less than remarkable and far from prolific. Jessica spawned the re-birth of my creative spirit after a dormant thirty years or so cutting a path through a creative desert, pursuing a career and raising a family.

Becoming a grandparent is very special and everything it is cracked up to be, but may be even more than that. I guess what flowed from my head when I wrote the original, was an attempt to explain an excess of emotional feeling that was almost overwhelming. But what is more remarkable is that this was not a one-off, flash in the pan. It also seeded a stream of thinking about our children and how important it is to give them love and security and how they thereby become a measure of our success in ensuring, insuring, assuring humanity of it’s future health. Parenthood [and Grandparenthood] is not to be taken lightly. It also sparked a journey of writing, both prose and poetry, that is still active today.

This version is (hopefully) the final edit, following a number of edits over the following year or so, which included a valuable Poetry Surgery, early in 2010, with the poet, Kona MacPhee.

JNA
January 2018.

Here’s the Poem