Someone else's mother speaks to me for the first time by Robert Ford

It wasn’t quite my first day there, and while I sat at the safety
of a long wooden table, a mile-wide belt of asteroid children
fizzed about the hall, high on screams and random collisions,

pounding its feet on a sprung floor all glassy with new varnish.
Her long-fingered hands were working the grown-up scissors,
the chafing of the blades against each other making that noise

I still don’t know the word for. You’re very patient, she told me,
freeing me from my cosmic reveries like one of the starfish
she was busily fashioning from a stack of coloured card.



Robert Ford lives on the east coast of Scotland. His poetry has appeared in both print and online publications in the UK and US, including Sweet Tree Review, Antiphon, Eunoia Review and Wildflower Muse. More of his work can be found at https://wezzlehead.wordpress.com/.