what we do
Ocean Drum
Sally Read
Sally Read visited Rainbows Children's Hospice in the East Midlands
Sally Read was born in Suffolk in 1971. She trained and worked as a psychiatric nurse in London while completing a BA with the Open University, and went on to earn her Master of Arts at the University of South Dakota, USA. She has since taught English in both London and Sardinia, and divides her time between Italy and Suffolk. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2001. Her two poetry collections are The Point of Splitting (2005), which was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize, and Broken Sleep (2009).
Ocean Drum
You lift a hand and almost hold a drum:
tiny ball-bearings avalanche down
the enclosed drum-skin as it’s tilted
on your lap by a woman
so it sounds like the ocean:
the pull and draw on shingle. White
roar, gritty peter to silence.
The woman’s not your mother
but she’s learnt to read you from
the angles of your head, smiles
that seem like the flutter
of a divining-rod miles above water.
She reaches to you often to stroke
your cropped blonde hair from your face.
Often, like a phrenologist determining
the mind from forehead, furrows,
ridges of the skull. She’s trying
to un-snag you from your cradle
of seized muscles, to show you the sea.
How will you know it:
drum-skin and shaken metal?
How does she know you from a gaze
that wavers as though through a pane
of green glass? I think of a mother’s
hands delineating over again a silky skull,
smoothing the legs of an infant,
as if we tell our children their forms
through our hands. Your hand’s
placed on top of the drum as if
to hear the rattle, spray, spume.
Something shifts like a newborn’s
deep eyes losing their inwardness
at sound beyond a room,
its hollow innuendo of distance.
Sally Read
