A nod to Demeter on International Women's Day

Bright sunny morning and a photo of some strawberry plants in our back garden with frost on them. I was given Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife for World Book Night and found this lovely poem Demeter.

I don't have daughters, nor blood sisters but I have many friendship sisters and come from a line of (ahem) feisty women. This poem got me thinking about all of them.

In case you're wondering, Demeter is the goddess of the harvest who presides over grains, fertility of the earth and the seasons. Apparently she also presides over - amongst other things - the cycle of life and death. Busy lady.

So, my offering to blippers for International Women's Day:

Where I lived - winter and hard earth.
I sat in my cold stone room
choosing tough words, granite, flint,

to break the ice. My broken heart -
I tried that, but it skimmed,
flat, over the frozen lake.

She came from a long, long way,
but I saw her at last, walking,
my daughter, my girl, across the fields,

in bare feet, bringing all spring's flowers
to her mother's house. I swear
the air softened and warmed as she moved,

the blue sky smiling, none too soon,
with the small shy mouth of a new moon.