Call the Midwife

Anthony Wilson 
Call the Midwife

What I like in a man:
not showing desperate –
though that’s what he was.
Old enough to know better,
saying most of it with his eyes.

So I dropped the turkey-
for-one and the telly
and followed him to the outskirts,
a closed-down Homebase
he’d forced the locks of,

past joinery and plumbing
till we found her on all fours
in sheds. It was only a matter
of time before security showed
then blue-lit us across town

to some kind of safety,
a ward I used to know
from before supplies ran out
and prices rocketed. 
Of course, they vanished.

Ran, more like it.
There’s fear, and there’s fear,
if you catch me. Something 
about papers, the border. Those eyes.
Her silence. The baby anything but.

Anthony Wilson

Sending all my readers a very happy Christmas and a peace-filled new year. I look forward to seeing you here again soon, Anthony.

You can read more Advent poems here
You can read more nativity poems here

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. My most recent books are Deck Shoes (Impress Books, 2019), a book of prose memoir and criticism, and The Afterlife (Worple Press, 2019). In 2023 I will publish The Wind and the Rain, my sixth collection of poems, with Blue Diode Press. My current research project, with Sue Dymoke from Nottingham Trent University and funded by the Foyle Foundation, is Young Poets' Stories: https://youngpoetsstories.com/. This blog is archived by the British Library.

10 Comments

  7. Thank you for this, Anthony. I follow your journey from my little home in the Sacramento valley and feel like I know you–because you are so willing to share who you are. Wishing you a lovely holiday and looking forward to how your life–how all of our lives–unfold in the coming year.

    Liked by 1 person

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  10. Thanks, Anthony. Best wishes from a fellow Exeter student of the late ’80s, doing a Ph.D on George Lyward  (of Finchden Manor) and his influence on ordinary education. See my e-card and some self-published poems. Best wishes, Jeremy Harvey PS I heard you talk at the Brendon about your excellent anthology.

    Liked by 1 person

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