Sally Spiers

Pupating

I gave birth to my father.
In post-partum photos I have the look of raw placenta
he is unravelling in soft blue homeknit.

My father does not know what an ugly baby he is. 
His turnip pate, his shrivelled apple face.
Growing from a volcano nose, one high-tensile polymer
is rooted with the tenacity of death. 
It does not serve as a lifeline.
His exoskeleton wingcase ears crack open, buzz and quiver
after lucidity and I cannot stand the crusty rind of his feet.

The gestation period was pachydermic.
I have drawn the line at breast-feeding 
though little else is sacred. 
He hangs all day from the ceiling, protests with sonar shrieks at bedtime. 
Nappy-changing is a nightmare and guano stains the carpets. 
My father has become a bat 
or a holometabolous insect. His parts pupate. 
I suspect he will emerge as a Deathshead moth
and yet, for now, he has the smile of a butterfly.

For 35 exhausting years Sally Spiers combined parenthood and being a teacher. When she retired and her children left home, she never looked back, throwing herself into catching up on missed years of self-development. Poetry has become a passion, alongside hiking, yoga and an active role in the peace movement. Her poems have been published by Ink, Sweat and Tears, Wildfire Words, the Morning Star and the International Times. She has had successes in various poetry competitions and is delighted to have been commissioned to write poems to support different campaign groups. 

 Sally said this about her poem:

‘Pupating’ arose from a challenge in a class with Caroline Bird, to write a poem about giving birth to your own parent. The surrealism of this proposition is ideally suited to describe the chaos of the role reversal of looking after a parent with Alzheimer's. I tried to write a poem that feels raw, unstructured and bizarre because that is how it feels to have a parent with dementia.