By Rebecca Bilkau
ISBN 978-1-9999728-7-5
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In this powerful sequence of poems, Rebecca Bilkau writes from first hand experience of illegitimacy, its effects on both parent and child and the complex ways it has featured in her and her mother’s life. The social stigma of the age she was born into may give rise to a healthy disdain but, above all, these are poems of reconciliation and celebration, ‘the wanted unwanted child’ affirming survival and fulfilment.
Rebecca Bilkau’s previous collections are Weather Notes (Oversteps Books), Choosing New Omens (Wayleave), Instructions for a Quiet Life (Oversteps). She is co-founder and managing editor of Beautiful Dragons Poetry Collaborations. Her cycle of poems The Blessed Round formed the libretto for a cantata of the same name composed by Helen Roe. Rebecca divides her time between Lower Saxony and Cumbria.
“The pamphlet startled me with its imagery, its honesty and raw emotions. I felt for both the single mothers, and for the child who imagines her dad as ‘a spectacular spy, a tsar on the run’.” Sue Wallace-Shaddad, Sphinx.
“The narration of events in the poet’s life-story is powerful but this sequence is most stunning when it goes out-wide to consider both the essence of social stigma and, most unusually, the very stuff of life in children who do not, or are not allowed to survive…This is the kind of writing that springs up from truth seeking, making an honest narration also a meditation.” Dilys Wood, Artemis.
You can hear and see Rebecca reading from ‘Sunday’s Child’ here: https://youtu.be/-o3JTcYJjFI
II
I was too old to cry when I learned
we un-fathered babies were stored,
unseen and unheard, in an attic,
like trunks not wanted in this voyage.
Maybe another.
Allowed, for a twilight hour,
nursing from the girls who bore us.
Snatched away again for the night.
Or life.
Infants confuse easily. Too many
cuddles from the girls who incubated us
could be unsettling when we met
our Proper Mummies.
Ma told me this looking the other way –
into the narrow times she defied,
tried to wipe from her diaries.
Records she didn’t keep.
The silence is still rasping.
She kept me.