At the first out-of-court
meeting of the tight-assed natural mother
and the soft-boiled surrogate,
the tension in the air
between them pulsed,
the photojournalist-in-ambush
whispering to the only other observer,
the birch opposite his willow perch,
“Holy Curdled!”

Face to face finally
after all the ledgered pages
and world-followed lawsuits, the two women
oblivious to him, but well within
his paparazzi view,
were standing far below,
posed with folded arms
beside the garden tarp
on this, the lawn of
impromptu middle-ground.

Both sides of the story, together
still surprised by each other’s stance,
neither retreatant
but under legal mandate to negotiate
for the sake of...their mutual creation.

Two years into the fight
the rivals had long abandonned
the embryonic alliance born of need,
and declined into enemies.

The journalist, who liked
his column on the yellow-side,
straddled the willow branch,
peering through leaves
his lenses earlier fogged but
now clear-circles of intrusiveness;
he carved his take on the two “flakes,”
he considered his subjects,
and snapped the picture.

“Ah,” he deduced, “now that I have my moved my head
I can no longer see mountains, valleys and a castle.”(1)

Nor would the readers of the tabloid,
he knew, when his feature story’d marked
the final stages of self-destruction
in the fairy-tale match,
between the one who could, and the one who couldn’t,
(conceive).

No magic scene for them,
but gold reality for him.
He’d found his camera fast
after finding them, that morning,
his ears, eyes, memory at the ready.

“Saskatoon berries”
uttered the surrogate
her first words to her rival,
in vein of harmony and reception,
pointing to the bush.

“I made tea, not on the samovar but on the kettle
crowned by the teapot with pink roses.” (2)

A formal offer of a feed,
flustering the “other” mother,
she straddled over the host’s Siamese cat-
trying to trip her up
as if so-trained.
Its owner’s face, one of a lion
making greedy licks.

A breeze lifting birch leaves
from the north border,
brought over another crop’s scent-
strawberry, over-sweet like the smiles
of this strange sorority-
their only foundation, the struggle
for a child in common -
the contest biblically classical.

They moved indoors
to continue the circle dance
of unacquainted dogs,
and the natural mother
bitter from her lost case,
deciding today, on her way out, she’d leave
the surrogate’s grass,
fresh-yellowed.

The photojournalist’s
favourite colour.

08/26/2005

Author's Note: 1) Tirra Lirra by the River, Jessica Anderson, Penguin Books 1978, p.17.
2)In the Walled Gardens, Anahita Firouz, Little Brown & Company, 2002, p.17 This poem was from an exercise in using 50 words taking from various books, and also several quotes from p.l7 of books chosen or at random selected, and incorporating them into a poem, within an hour or so (during a class exercise at the lake with a group). tight-assed, soft-boiled and surrogate were among the early ones on my word list. It was a fun excercise.

Posted on 08/27/2005
Copyright © 2025 Maureen Glaude