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3 Sept 2024
Elizabeth
Loudon
New Moon
Sep 18th
Y Tu Mamá
También
Aug 19th
After Alfonso Cuarón’s film
Y tu mamá también
Except in a film where a lovely woman
romps with teenagers on a beach,
does any woman say let me straddle
the hips of men, blaze and burn
when I’ve six weeks left?
Nobody touched my friend
during the pandemic years,
and then as they ended
she felt a knife-stab, unbearable.
A crab had chewed through her ovaries.
The revenge of the children I never had,
she said – her one drop of acid, allowable.
Some people don’t make love for years,
or not with the beloved.
Or the beloved makes love with others.
Let’s tell them about the celibates,
holy, sporadic, or involuntary:
Yeats, in thrall to imperious Maud
and crazy for tinderbox symbols,
Hildegard, for whom the devil appeared
as a giant Cheshire cat, next to a man
with a furry sporran,
a gaggle of louts agape with wonder.
Let’s say, what a foolish film,
what wishful ignorance,
believing that a woman in peril
will snatch at a handful of boy
on a cheap sheet in a seaside motel,
the mouth of her body stretched wide
as the sprawl that isn’t yet hungry
again. My friend left me earrings,
amber tears. She made sure
never to see me wear them.
From the heart of the tree they came,
from what breaks through bark under duress,
and bleeds, and forms.
Behind the poem...
My poem Y Tu Mamá También (trans. And Your Mother Too) was inspired by Alfonso Cuarón’s gorgeous 2001 Mexican film of the same name. When I first saw it, I was annoyed by what I then thought was its romanticisation of terminal cancer. I’ve since lost dear friends to this terrible disease – and while none of them went on a wild and sexy road trip with two 17-year-olds, my feelings about the film and its message have changed. I care much less now about the accuracy of medical depictions on screen. Instead, I cherish any art that celebrates life in the face of death.
