This is a poem about adoption.
Marker by Christine Laennec
The day of the handover
The social worker said,
“If she’s going on about Mummy’s tower,
she means the one in Northfield
the one you can see
from anywhere in Aberdeen.”
And so you can.
For months our lives were
tracked by
overshadowed by
always in reference to
that unremitting sentinel.
Now I am her Mummy.
I have no tower.
Perhaps I don’t need one:
I am there all the time.
And the Northfield mast
is just another blot on the landscape,
one of the many scars
that my daughter doesn’t notice.
This poem was included on the “Inspired Gossip” CD made by the Spring Tides poetry group in 2003. © Christine Laennec 2003
