Poem Of The Week: Opera By Robert Crawford

Opera

Throw all your stagey chandeliers in wheelbarrows and move them north
to celebrate my mother's sewing machine
and her beneath an eighty-watt bulb, pedalling
iambs on an antique metal footplate
powering the needle through its regular lines,
doing her work. To me as a young boy
that was her typewriter. I'd watch
her hands and feet in unison, or read
between her calves the wrought-iron letters:
SINGER. Mass-produced polished wood and metal,
it was a powerful instrument. I stared
hard at its brilliant needle's eye that purred
and shone at night; and then each morning after
I went to work at school, wearing her songs.

Image by Flsoprani from Pixabay

Robert Crawford’s gorgeous sonnet to his mother transfigures her labour into a kind of art. The work to which she is committed is transformed, in her industry, into a spectacle no less impressive than a performance, whose accoutrements - the ‘stagey chandeliers’ – might illuminate a fitting homage to her vocation.

And if the poet’s panegyric errs on the side of hubris, it is a deliberate means of aggrandizing the stage her artistry adorns into a theatre of near mock-heroic proportions. A simulacrum, almost, of his own poetic endeavours - his mother’s creative instinct clearly presages his own – the poem is a celebration of the power of words to make a simple, if complex, effort of work into a song of love and creation. The ‘brilliant needle’s eye’, the consonance of hands and feet, and the regularity of his mother’s lines give figurative body to Crawford’s sense of poetic form; her skill and her endeavour are no less, possibly more, meaningful because the son has acquired the mother’s facility for creative articulation.

The written word runs through ‘Opera’ like a satisfying continuous stitch; the two forms of expression are intertwined, making a union of artistic purpose.

‘Opera’ is taken from 101 Sonnets from Shakespeare to Heaney, edited by Don Paterson, and is published by Faber and Faber.