Poetry Thursday - Empty Nest by Carol Ann Duffy

Empty Nest 

by Carol Ann Duffy

Dear child, the house pines when you leave.
I research whether there is any bird who grieves
over its empty nest.
Your vacant room
is a still-life framed by the unclosed door;
read by sunlight, an open book on the floor.

I fold the laundry; hang your flower dress in darkness. Forget-me-nots.

*

Beyond the tall fence, I hear horse-chestnuts
counting themselves.
Then autumn; Christmas.
You come and go, singing. Then ice; snowdrops.

Our home hides its face in hands of silence.

I knew mothering, but not this other thing
which hefts my heart each day. Heavier.
Now I know.

*

This is the shy sorrow. It will not speak up.

I play one chord on the piano;
it vanishes, tactful,
as dusk muffles the garden; a magpie staring from its branch.
The marble girl standing by the bench.

From the local church, bells like a spelling.
And the evening star like a text.
And then what next . . .

(via)

My encounter with this poem was sparked by mention of it in a conversation about our children leaving home. In looking for it online I found this mention in an interview last month, as she prepares to step down as Poet Laureate, after 10 years on the job:

“Empty Nest”, for her daughter Ella (Duffy is an unashamedly doting mother), is at the heart of the collection. “When our children leave and go to university and start their lives it’s a very hidden grief,” she says. “We tend to be stiff upper lipped, but it is a real blow. You still are a parent, but that kind of daily devotional ritual is gone.” She plans to put together an anthology on the subject “so that people have somewhere to go with that sorrow”. 

The poem appears in her new collection, Sincerity, a book that is angrier and more political than her best-selling collections, but with a refrain of bereavement running through it.

Sincerity is also very personal, with quieter poems on bereavement and the less talked about grief, or “shy sorrow”, of a child leaving home. She set out “to see where I am at this age”, her early 60s: “I think poets should write not only from somewhere but from somewhen.”