Lifesaving Lines: Poem for Wednesday, by Naomi Jaffa

Anthony Wilson, , ,

Recently, my relationship with Wednesdays has changed. It’s quite a long story, and one I don’t want to trouble you with. Suffice to say, thanks to the generosity and kindess of some people at my workplace, Wednesday morning has been a refuge for me in the last few weeks, a breathing space I look forward to instead of just another day when I hack away at emails and generally spiral and forget to breathe.

The poem that has been accompanying me on this reconfiguration is Naomi Jaffa’s ‘Poem for Wednesday’, from her wonderful pamphlet of poems Driver (Garlic Press, 2017). (To read the poem, go the link and click on the second thumbnail image. You can also read the magical and heartbreaking poem ‘Sign’ from the same collection at Kim Moore’s blog here. Six quid plus postage. What is that, two coffees and a bun? There isn’t a poem in it which is not true and profound and achieved. What are you waiting for?).

It is a poem of direct address, or as they say in the US, apostrophe. It begins with a line that contains the word humpback. Not a word you see, or hear, very much these days. And that’s why I love it: ‘Oh, humpback of the week,/ yardstick of productivity,/ all to play for, seesaw pivot/ of possibility.’ Isn’t that brilliant? All those ‘i’ and ‘c’ sounds jammed up together, the buried rhyme of ‘productivity’ and ‘possibility’.That’s it!, I said, as I opened the book at that very page, back in 2017.

Typing these words out, I am aware that it also rare to see in poems another word from from my ’70s childhood, ‘seesaw’. The tone here is far from child-like, however. Later we encounter a fishmonger, Matt, ‘fresh from brain surgery,/ his scalp fuzzy with new growth’, and ‘plump scallops/ glistening on their bed of ice’. Death is never far away from any of the poems in Driver, and ‘Poem for Wednesday’ is no different. Nevertheless, its jubilant ending is fully deserved and one that sends me into the rest of this day (I honour it by typing this on a Wednesday) and this week looking for an exucse to ‘be lavish and splash out’. Poems that do this are rare, unfortunately, but Naomi has made one of the beautiful exceptions.

Published by Anthony Wilson

I am a lecturer, poet and writing tutor. I work in teacher and medical education at the University of Exeter. My anthology Lifesaving Poems was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015. In 2012 I published Riddance (Worple Press), a collection of poems, and Love for Now (Impress Books), a memoir, about my experience of cancer. The Wind and the Rain, my sixth collection of poems, is available now from Blue Diode Publishing. My current research project, funded by the Foyle Foundation, is Young Poets' Stories: https://youngpoetsstories.com/. This blog is archived by the British Library.

6 Comments

  3. Dearest Anthony

    I was – and remain – /deeply /touched by your recent post about my ‘Poem for Wednesday’. It was a huge and very heart-warming surprise to receive and read your beautiful understanding and endorsement and your validation has continued to give me an unfamiliar but very welcome glow of satisfaction. I do almost /nothing /with my poems – I barely remember that I write them, most of the time – and so it comes as a lovely gift when one of them ‘lands’ with a reader, especially when I get feedback of the quality of your response.

    Thank you VERY much.

    sending much love

    Naomi xx

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Thank you, Dear Naomi, for your kind words and encouragement. I appreciate them enormously. Thank you, too, for your marvellous poetry, which has been very close to me in this year of grief and longing and distance. With much love to you as ever, Anthony xx

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