Sam Szanto lives in Durham, UK. Her collaborative, prize-winning poetry pamphlet, ‘Splashing Pink’ was published by Hedgehog Press in July 2023. She has been published in a number of literary journals including ‘The North’. She won the 2020 Charroux Poetry Prize and the Twelfth First Writer International Poetry Prize.
My Mother, the Protestor
Arms are for linking
When I was a child, my mother chained herself
to a high-wire fence decorated with toys,
ribbons, messages, wool and nappies
to protest against nuclear weapons.
I picture her, younger than I am now,
with hennaed hair, a grubby cardigan
smelling of woodsmoke and lentils
going for the cause and staying for the friendship,
the singing, the dancing and hand-holding.
Fight war, not wars
Did she join in with the mass
ululations? Was she dragged out of her tent
in the dead of night by soldiers?
It’s easier to imagine her chatting
with them through the fence
about their wives and daughters
Whose side are you on?
but she was not me,
with my caution, fear and people-pleasing.
She would have put on
a belt of bolt-cutters, destroyed fences
and stormed watchtowers
before making a nice cup of tea
for everyone.
Note: The words in italics are those used by the women protesting at the Greenham Common Peace Camp.
Tea
At four o’clock, he is given tea
in a baby-blue Tommee Tippee cup,
regarding it, perhaps comically, perhaps not,
raising a pinkie like he’s in a Mayfair coffee shop
his fingers shake vociferously. ‘Damn,’
he says with a metallic swish that cuts
through the room’s muffled wool. Wordless,
a lid on my sadness, I sit beside him, hold his hand,
bring up the cup slow as a tick of a grandfather
clock to his now clamped-shut lips.