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For some background about the poet, see the Context section of We Remember Your Childhood Well.
Subject matter
Before You Were Mine
I'm ten years away from the corner you laugh onwith your pals, Maggie McGeeney and Jean Duff.The three of you bend from the waist, holdingeach other, or your knees, and shriek at the pavement.Your polka-dot dress blows round your legs. Marilyn.
I'm not here yet. The thought of me doesn't occurin the ballroom with the thousand eyes, the fizzy, movie tomorrowsthe right walk home could bring. I knew you would dancelike that. Before you were mine, your Ma stands at the closewith a hiding for the late one. You reckon it's worth it.
The decade ahead of my loud, possessive yell was the best one, eh?I remember my hands in those high-heeled red shoes, relics,and now your ghost clatters toward me over George Squaretill I see you, clear as scent, under the tree,with its lights, and whose small bites on your neck, sweetheart?
Cha cha cha! You'd teach me the steps on the way home from Mass,stamping stars from the wrong pavement. Even thenI wanted the bold girl winking in Portobello, somewherein Scotland, before I was born. That glamorous love lastswhere you sparkle and waltz and laugh before you were mine.
The poet is talking to her mother, having seen a photo of her mother as a teenager.
Picture courtesy of Katya Knyazeva
- She describes the photo of her mother standing laughing with two of her friends.
- She knows that the thought of having a child one day doesn't occur to her mother when young, when she was wrapped up in a world of dances and teenage dreams.
- Now remembering her own childhood, the poet thinks of how she used to play with her mother's red shoes and imagines when her mother might have worn those shoes to meet a boyfriend in George Square (in Glasgow).
- She remembers how her mother used to teach her dance steps when she was a child - yet even back then, the young poet wished she could have known her mother when still young and carefree, before she was a mother - 'Before you were mine'.
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