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Jamie Riddell
‘Hold Fast’
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Hold FastJamie Lucinda MacLeod Riddell
Because of my mother I am a MacLeod
And to MacLeod is to hold fast.
To hold is to keep blood warm
To fast in the winter is to brave the water.
The son of Leod comes from Oold Norse
Which means ‘ugly’ or ‘ugly wolf’
And if you cross a MacLeod
That is what you’ll see them become.
I ask my mother’s mother -
Who now I can only visit by the shoreline:
Please stand by when I cut fruit, and
When I’m ankle deep by the bay, when
I’m standing up for myself,
Wearing emerald,
Drinking in the garden on Halloween
(Celebrating flora) (celebrating your birthday.)
When visiting the shoreline I ask her a question.
Write my call in the sand. I say please twice because
There’s no need for frivolous metaphor,
Ruby but redundant. The sand already knows,
It laughs to itself, so as to say:
Go on. Get it out.
Go write about your Grandma and cry.
So I do, and make sure to skip all the Grammar.
There’s no time anyway, the tide is rising up
To wash away my wet carved prayer.
Be as it may, the language lives on,
It always lives on and on
And on. A warm October is as concerning
as it is a hug.
It calls for a Coke can to my forehead,
Cooling down by the street cats
And sitting in the cinema for respite.
I walk barefoot on the pavement and notice the callouses.
Since her passing I have grown a pirate grit.
Aging like cowboy leather,
Reaching for old recipes like they’re bible and
Lying on the trampoline, studying the sway of eucalypt branches
to try make out their calligraphy in the sky.
As for sleep, the rock of the water
beneath my bed frame swells proudly.
I focus on the alarm clock light to keep it at bay
Until I am trudging up sand dunes inside an hour glass.
The molly coddle of the timer lulls my ugly wolf howl.
In dreams, the weeping woman salts a babbling brook,
And when I say weeping I mean keeping
Hold of the girl I run from and back home to.
Holding fast to my mother’s mother,
The MacLeod name, for all of its primal legacy.