"Breaker"

A Note on “Breaker” from Tom Sleigh:

Last week I shared my poem about two twin boys who had grown so used to living in a war zone that mortar barrages at teatime had become synonymous with playtime. This week I’ll read "Breaker", a poem about being a stepparent and taking my first real walk with my stepdaughter.

Before I met Hannah, I had no children. I’d been told that you measure time differently when your life and a child’s life are suddenly running parallel, and I’ve found that to be true. When I look at Hannah’s face now, the woman she’s grown into and the child she was remind me of how densely involuted time can seem. For example, just a few days ago, after not having visited for something like two years because of Covid, I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and saw an ancient Greek grave stele sculpted in marble of a woman who holds what looks like a new-born infant on her lap. The woman’s face is in profile, and the bridge of her nose, as well as its tip, have been sheared away. The baby is wrapped in swaddling, the face turned from us so that you can see how the back of the infant’s head has been worn smooth by wind and rain. When you read the label, you learn, with a quiet shock, that the infant is in fact a grandchild, and the woman the child’s grandmother. The inscription reads: "My daughter’s beloved child is the one I hold here, the one that I held on my lap while we looked at the light of the sun when we were alive and that I still hold, now that we are both dead."