Chris and my Mother

afharrold:

This week would have contained my mother’s 70th birthday (probably on the 28th, though possibly the 27th – I relied on her for remembering birthdays), had she not had the unbecoming bad grace to die five and a half years ago.

I wrote a sequence of poems about her illness, death and my orphaning which was published by Two Rivers Press as The Point of Inconvenience.

In my most recent collection for children, Things You Find In a Poet’s Beard, there are a couple of poems for and about her as well. One of them has been illustrated by the astonishingly generous Chris Riddell on a train journey he made (on the way to do some kids’ poetry events with me today). (The book has a lot of pictures by him in, but not these…)

Poem For My Mum