Poésie

On Mother’s Day 1996 — when I was just a tempestuous, turbulent sixteen-year-old dreamer— I gave my mum a book of poetry. Correction: I wrote my mum a book of poetry. A hardcover, lockable, blue floral-patterned book, filled with my handwritten verse…

It wasn’t the first writing I had ‘published’.

From the moment I knew I had to be a writer — sitting in the backseat of the family car, at age five, clutching Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree in wonder — I had been writing stories, and making my ‘books’. I started composing poetry in earnest when I was nine (My first poem was about a harrowing bushfire, and my sixteen-year-old self still loved it enough to include in mum’s collection.)

As a teen, poetry was my vital creative outlet, channeling all those big passions and tragedies we suffer and swoon through, and never truly forget. I also kept countless journals, and wrote rambling, thick letters to my penpals and long-distance friends.

But poetry was my salve during those years.

Collating all my best (read: most painful) poems, and writing them out by hand into one anthology, was about the most precious and intimate gift I might have given my mum as a teenager…

Mum thought so too. She slept with my poetry book right by her pillow — and read it constantly.

{Dear Reader, I’m not claiming I was her favourite child. That’s just what I insinuate to my siblings...}

There were blank pages left in mum’s book, so sometimes I’d steal it back, and gift her newer, even more vulnerable and visceral poems. I did this right up to the age of twenty-one, after which I moved out of home to pursue another university degree in far-away Brisbane.

Mum has kept my book, all these years. A twenty-four-year-old relic of the years when writing was my crutch and being published, my most fervent dream.

Not much, apart from my handwriting and my liberal use of Liquid Paper, has changed. I am still the wide-eyed dreamer, tempestuous and turbulent, who just wants to write beautiful stories for others to keep under-pillow.

I borrowed mum’s book this week, for the sake of reminiscing. She was none too pleased about the possibility of my losing or damaging it, which is as flattering for a grown woman, as it was for a teenager. I would love to sneak it back to her with new poems appended — but these days, I email my mum rough chapters of my manuscript-in-progress, instead. (It doesn’t have the suffering rawness of teenage poetry — but it is still raw, and I often suffer over it.)

Re-reading mum’s book, I found to my delight, the first seeds and blooms of whole stories I have written since. I had expected to cringe over my fraught adolescent verses, but in fact felt nothing but gratitude…

For my younger self, willing to commit to page her deepest and most tender feelings, and for the woman who was keeping watch over my life as I did so.

xx Averil