I’d like to finish with this one called ‘The Lost Woman’. The more one reads poetry or novels, the more one realises that almost every writer has a lost woman somewhere or other – a woman he deserted, as in the case of Wordsworth – that applies to Wordsworth too, but I was thinking much more of “surprised by joy, impatient as the wind” – a daughter who died, mothers, mistresses, girlfriends, daughters, grandmothers, anybody. Every writer nearly always has a lost woman. And it was a great stimulus to me to suddenly realise that so had I and this is ‘The Lost Woman’. And this is as far as I’ve got in speaking about this event.
The Lost Woman
My mother went with no more warning
Than a bright voice and a bad pain.
Home from school on a June morning
And where the brook goes under the lane
I saw the back of a shocking white
Ambulance drawing away from the gate.
She never returned and I never saw
Her buried. So a romance began.
The ivy-mother turned into a tree
That still hops away like a rainbow down
The avenue as I approach.
My tendrils are the ones that clutch.
I made a life for her over the years.
Frustrated no more by a dull marriage
She ran a canteen through several wars.
The wit of a clich
