As a child I remember walking by the waves,

hair blowing wild, laughing with my mother.

When mussel shells crunched underneath

our wellingtoned feet, and I could taste

salt on my lips. They were deep blue,

the mussels, and I shouted how I loved this place.

 

Later, warmer, she smiled with a sadness I couldn’t place

and looked out of the window at the waves.

The walls of the pub were pale blue,

I remember. I had scampi and my mother

ordered mussels. She asked me if I wanted a taste

and I balked at the open shells, the salty bodies underneath.

 

I watched her eat them deftly, peering from underneath

my fringe, scratched patterns with my fork on the place

mat and wished that I could acquire that particular taste,

and that my hair didn’t fall in stubborn waves.

I remember I wanted people to tell me I looked like my mother,

that I had the same elfin face, that our eyes were the same blue.

 

We moved on, but I take the sea with me now. Fill each of my homes with its blue,

its wild salt. Jars of shells line up on the mantelpiece, and underneath

propped up in the hearth, is a painting of a lighthouse by my mother.

The perspective is wrong, the rocks too big; but it anchors me as I move from place

to place, its thick, white paintbeam bright against the darkness of the waves.

After too much wine, my best friend laughs and tells me I have no taste.

 

I smile and say it’s not a question of taste,

that the picture, the shells, seaweed garlands and the cracked, blue

vase that reminds me so much of the whorls of mussel shells and the waves

as they break on the beach, are my charms. That underneath

the job, the rent, the ability to sew on a button, there is that place

where I’m still a child, where, secretly, I miss my mother.

 

She used to tell me stories about her own mother

and their travels together. How she’d developed a taste

for the new on her tongue and the soles of her feet. In each new place

she’d whirl laughing through fresh rooms as I watched. Sometimes I’d find blue

stains on her pillow. They oozed from the lavender sprigs she kept underneath

as she slept, crushed in her fingers, soothing the homesickness that came in waves.

 

So there will always be a place for you here, Mother, wherever here

happens to be. Your lavender talisman and my wild waves have the same taste,

the sweet, blue tang of home that stays with us, pulsing, underneath it all.