Ten kids per family. Shankill near Bray. 
My two obviously the result of birth control.
No, we are not Catholics.
Feminists in Dublin station handing out
what is forbidden - condoms, IUDs...
The Pope wants you to procreate. Make
more members of the true
Church. The women went to the North
and came back with contraceptive goodies.
Giveaways crowdfunded the old-fashioned way. 

It is nineteen seventy four. Leprechauns galore 
and double rainbows. Pale straw yellow against
fat, dark browns, wet slate and a hot toddy.
Peat in the open fire and stories to tell
at the grocer’s—or they won’t let you go.
Driving with dirty laundry to the laundromat
at Dún Laoghaire, where the ferries go.
The ex-nun sleeping with my husband,
the IRA waiting to make a point. Nobody

told me. But I saw the bearded gang
looking at us in the mirrors behind
the bar in the pub that's perched precariously
in the Wicklow Mountains. The ‘Carpenters’
on BBC2 in my old Ami Eight. My two kids
beating each other in the back. Stop this
immediately or I’ll kill you.

There is nothing quite like Irish soda bread.
Being mum, I am in the kitchen, must pick up
my two at their respective schools soon. 
The two dalmatians come panting, just 
when I am about to carry the vegetable
waste to the bins. Noooo, not again. I run
out from cleaning the veggies, knife in hand,
to shoo them away. Not the first time. 
Dalmatians are scavengers. 
Soon the owner, a pediatrician, father
of eleven, will be at my door:
In this country we don’t kill dogs.
                        

Düsseldorf
Helsinki
Paris
Antwerp
Amsterdam
London. The 60s. A husband and a family.
My mother tongue goes on crutches
with a disturbed syntax,
while I am growing
into my new language
yet unformed, a toddler
that wobbles with insecure legs onto a page.

Everything is new and not that shiny.
Learning how to be a wife, soon to be a mother.
Finding out where the buses go. Living on love
and father-in-law’s occasional offerings (he’s got 
a shop in Finsbury Park… food, mostly.)

Liebe Mutti, Ich brauche Dich. I need you, Mum.
The telephone is expensive, letters take up to five days.
By the time they get to their destination, the news
is old. When I bring that baby home, I am sure
I’ll kill him. Washing the nappies by hand,
moving my hips to the neighbour’s blue beat.

I can’t quite express what is in me, I don’t quite
understand the laughter that follows an obvious
joke, not that the joke is at all obvious to me. I dress
like the Queen Mum at parties designed for minis or
bell-bottoms. My slow waltzes still inform my first twist,
my friends gently take the piss,
and I am not yet sure about the ‘why’.

Years pass, my language is English, the learning
curve was steep, the result satisfying. Laughing about
myself comes easy, and I discover a sense of humour
that draws from a well I share in a surprising
and profound way. I read my favourites in the original.
I timidly reach out to words that might a poem make.

Life’s vagaries bring me to Lima via Madrid.
My tangos are blighted by the memory of flamenco,
salsa a far cry from the Beatles,
and I am fluent in Spanish.
I am fluent in Catholic, and fluent
in Latin shoulder shrugs. I have learned to read
through superficial amabilidad and the every-day language
of taking oneself very seriously. 

But my library, sprinkled with books
in the languages of distant planets,
is filled with pages in English, the last plank of my ship
that broke apart somewhere over the Pacific.