I am hugely pregnant: whale-like is the only word for it, and like the whale in the Biblical story, I am carrying a stowaway. I carry him gladly, selflessly. I leap into action to protect him. My eldest – now a two-year-old – found his way into my bed overnight, his cold, little feet pressed up against my thighs. I dress him under the covers, pull a wool sweater over my pregnant belly. We spend that day in a diner, eating pancakes, drinking hot coffee. I whisper sweet things to my baby just on the brink of being born. Not yet, I tell him, and he stays put.

The polar storm reminds me of what lengths I will take to protect my children. The one beside me in the bed in the freezing house, and the one in my stomach that I was about to birth. I wonder sometimes if we need this lesson. When mishaps like this happen, it might teach us that all our contraptions and tech cannot protect us from the weather.

*

RM: Today, we cannot write about the natural world unaware of man-made weather. The most minute detail of poetry is thus politicized. Such knowledge becomes part of the mythification of place. Where does this originate? Partly from Decima Minhinnick, my mother, 94, who inherited her family’s ‘paranoid schizophrenia’, and instils in her twins a love of literature and curiosity about the natural world. In poetry I have made two attempts to describe her schizophrenic life.

…You named The constellations as they swung Over our heads, fuzzy balls of Galaxies pulsing in a glass, The Milky Way’s a fine spiderweb.

It’s only now we understand. You have been looking away from us For a long time… (from ‘Breaking Down’)2

Recent writing describes my visits to her care home.

miraculous morphine, its constellation like the sword of Orion you showed me, a girl with stargazy eyes, pointing to brickred

Beetlejuice, its dazzling azimuth.

2. See Robert Minhinnick’s poem ‘Breaking Down’ (The Dinosaur Park, Seren, 1985).

1 9 P O E T R Y W A L E S