Jenny Munro-Hunt

My son talks in his sleep and I think of Tarkovsky

he is dreaming, he is four,
he is talking to his mother
his mother

softly, simulacrum, don’t
put me in his bad graces
when he wakes;

hair up or hair down? have you
been in my wardrobe?
if pressed, would he know

the original? how sewn
are you
to his specifications?

have you
the necessary parts
for worry?

a night ocean churns, dredges
shadow mothers from the dark; we pray
at the beds of our beloveds.

Jenny Munro-Hunt is a Glaswegian poet whose work has appeared in Raceme, Poetry Scotland, The 6ress, Soor Plooms and several anthologies. She was longlisted for the 2022 Winchester Poetry Prize and her debut pamphlet is forthcoming from Black Cat Poetry Press.

Jenny wrote the following about her poem:

In Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris, a scientist aboard a space station encounters what seems to be the resurrection of his dead wife, brought into form and sentience by the ocean of the planet Solaris as it accesses his memories of her. One evening in 2021, when my son was asleep, I heard him say ‘mummy,’ and resigned myself to him having woken up already (he rarely slept through the night). He was still asleep, having a conversation with a dreamed version of me, created from his own memories.